Peter Singer: Animal suffering is human responsibility

What does it mean to live ethically in our interconnected world? Author, activist, and philosopher Peter Singer argues that moral progress depends not on tradition or emotion, but on reason—and that each of us has the power to reduce suffering and improve lives through conscious choices that reduce ‘Speciesism.’

Singer’s perspective asks viewers to move beyond thought, asking them to act in alignment with their moral compasses.

PETER SINGER: I’m Peter Singer. I’m Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and I’m the author of the just published book, “Animal Liberation Now.” Part I: The argument for animal liberation. What was the impetus behind writing “Animal Liberation”?

– I wrote “Animal Liberation” in 1975 because I was convinced that I had stumbled onto something very important that most people were oblivious to, and I felt that way because it was only a few years earlier, five years earlier, to be precise, that I myself had stumbled upon this: The fact that the animals that up till then all my life I had been eating had not had, as I had imagined, pleasant lives outside in the field until one final day they were trucked to slaughter. But rather increasingly, more and more of them had lived their entire lives inside, crowded into sheds, treated in ways that were obviously quite contrary to their welfare, just so that their meat or eggs or milk could be produced as cheaply as possible. And it was that eye-opening discovery that led me to think about what is the moral status of animals? Are we really justified in treating them this way? And I fairly quickly decided that we’re not, and that therefore the way I’d been eating and the way the majority of people in the world were eating was really indefensible. So I wrote “Animal Liberation” in 1975 because I wanted to tell more people about that. And my hope, perhaps in hindsight a naive one, was that telling them about it would lead them to stop doing it.

– What reactions has “Animal Liberation” elicited?

– “Animal Liberation” has had different impacts on different people. There are quite a number of people who’ve come up to me and said things like, “I was eating meat when I started reading ‘Animal Liberation,’ and by the time I’d finished it, I decided that I had to be vegetarian.” And that’s wonderful, you know, that people can read a book and it can change their lives in that way. There were other people who had what I regard as a less fortunate, maybe less ethical reaction, and that is, “I read your book. I think I admit the arguments are pretty strong. I really tend to agree that the things we’re doing to animals are bad. But I just like eating meat, and I really can’t imagine myself stopping doing that.” And clearly that’s not the reaction I was hoping to produce, but it is, I guess, something that tells you something about human nature, that it varies across people, and that some people are going to continue to do things even if that leaves them with some kinda residual guilt that they’re doing something wrong.

– Why did you decide to update the book?

– In the last couple of decades, “Animal Liberation” had become seriously out of date. It hadn’t been properly revised since 1990, so all of the factual material, the material about factory farming and what that was like, what that was doing to animals, the statistics about the numbers, all that was out of date. So was the chapter looking at the way we use animals in research, because the experiments I was describing were from the 1980s or earlier. And somebody reading that book would probably say, you know, “This is not relevant to today,” and they’d be right. It wasn’t. So I wanted to update the factual material, but there were also other things that I wanted to do. I wanted to make the book more global because in 1975, factory farming and meat-eating was really dominated by the more affluent Western countries. But in the 48 years since then, Asia, and particularly China, have become both more populous and more prosperous, and while it’s always good for countries to become more prosperous, the downside of this was that people in China could afford to buy more meat and wanted to buy more meat. And it’s such a large population that that’s made a huge contribution to the number of animals living in factory farms. So I felt the book was one-sided if it didn’t take account of that. And then the final thing that I wanna mention is that because of when the book was written, it didn’t discuss climate change. And if we’re looking at reasons for changing our diet, and in particular for eating less meat or not eating meat at all, then climate change has become a really important and urgent reason why we should cease to eat meat, particularly cease to eat meat from ruminant animals like beef and lamb. So I felt I needed to get that into the book.

– What reforms have you seen since the 1975 edition?

– To balance against the fact that there are actually more animals in factory farms now than there were in 1975, we can put the fact that in some parts of the world there have been significant reforms and improvements made. I’m not saying that they’re sufficient, but we have to acknowledge that the animal movement, which to some extent was sparked by “Animal Liberation,” or certainly a lot of leaders of animal organizations like Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have said that she founded that organization after reading “Animal Liberation.” So those organizations in many different countries, including in Europe and the United Kingdom, they have led to reforms that have meant some of the worst forms of confinement that I described in 1975 are no longer legal in the European Union, in the United Kingdom, and in some states, but unfortunately not yet most states of the United States. Firstly, the standard wire cage for egg laying hens was one of the worst things that I came across. It’s a really small wire cage, too small for even one hen to fully stretch her wings in that wire enclosure. And yet one hen wouldn’t be alone in that enclosure, she’d be there with three, four other hens. So incredibly crowded, a miserable life for hens, hardly any space. And hens have an instinct to lay their eggs in a sheltered sort of nesting area. That, of course, wasn’t possible in a bare wire cage. So in the European Union and the United Kingdom, by law, hens have to have significantly more space so they can stretch their wings, and they have to have access to a sheltered nesting area. And in some parts of the United States like California, they certainly have to have more space to spread their wings. So those are important moves. Secondly, both for veal cows and for breeding sows, the mother pigs of the pigs sent to market, they were confined in very narrow stalls or crates so narrow that they couldn’t turn around, and they could barely, you know, shuffle half a step forward or backwards. That was all the movement they could do. And the point of that was to stop them turning around because if they turned around, then their feces would fall in the front of the cage where the food was gonna go, and it would be harder to clean. It would involve more labor. So to prevent that, keep them so that they can’t even turn around. And that’s clearly a terrible life for these intelligent animals, whether they’re pigs or calves, so that’s now also prohibited; they have to have more room. In the European Union and the United Kingdom, sows are generally housed as a social group. That happens in some parts of the United States, but very often it doesn’t. And similarly with veal calves, they might now, even in the United States, though it’s not legally required, have space to turn around, but they’re still often kept singly isolated. And these are very social animals, and of course they’ve been separated from their mother at a very early age, so it’s still a pretty miserable life for them.

– Where has there been regression in animal treatment?

– It’s certainly a great concern that there is now so much factory farming in countries which have no animal welfare regulation- and China is the biggest example of that. China is now building 26-story buildings that are essentially pig factories. On every floor there are pigs crammed into that building. Again, the breeding sows will not have room to turn around. The other pigs will have a little bit of room to move around, but they’re still quite tightly packed into groups and they never get to walk outside. They never get to enjoy the sunshine or root around in the grass. It’s a totally miserable existence for them, I believe. So that’s one great concern, the spread of factory farming. The other concern that I have, or one of the other concerns that I have, is that in the chicken meat industry, which is the largest of the land-based vertebrate animals in terms of the numbers, so we’re talking worldwide of 70 billion chickens raised each year, and in the United States alone something like 9 billion. So these birds have been bred to grow faster and faster, so nowadays when you buy a chicken at the supermarket, it’s been killed at about six weeks of age, around 42 days of age. Really, it’s a baby, but it’s a very big baby. Why is it so big? Because they’ve been bred to have a huge appetite and to grow very fast. Now, that leads to a couple of really serious welfare problems: One is that they put on weight so fast that their leg bones, which are still very immature, struggle to bear their weight, and in some instances, in every flock of hens, a number of them fail to bear their weight, so their legs collapse under them. They can’t move, they’re lying on the ground on what’s called litter, this sort of mix of maybe sawdust or shavings and straw or something, but with lots of their bird droppings in it. They can’t move. They can’t get to food or water if they don’t happen to be within reach of it. And they’re just gonna die of dehydration because nobody looks after individual birds in a chicken shed. It’s just not worth paying the labor to do so from the point of view of the owners. And if their legs don’t collapse even, they make it through to slaughter, for the last two weeks they’ll be in pain standing up because of the weakness of their leg bones and their heavy body weight. Now, there’s one other aspect of that that I wanna mention. Think about the parents of these birds. Obviously they have to have the same genes as these birds who are killed at the age of six weeks, but they have to live a lot longer because chickens don’t become sexually mature that fast. So if you want to have breeding birds, you have to keep them for months. And yet if they ate so much as they want to eat, like their offspring will eat and will want to eat, they would not survive. They would get so fat that they would probably collapse, maybe they would get heart attacks. Or if somehow some of them did survive, they probably wouldn’t be able to mate because their chest would be so big that they wouldn’t really be able to have sex. So what is done with the breeder birds is essentially to starve them. And you can read poultry industry journals which talk about what’s called a skip a day feeding regime. And as that suggests, you only feed them every second day. Now, the journals that look at this acknowledge that that creates a problem. The birds are very, very hungry. They look around for some food, they don’t find it, but they do have water and so they drink excess amounts of water, so much water that that can harm them. And so the remedy to that, according to the industry advice, is cut off the water. Don’t allow them to drink as much water as they would like either, which they’re only drinking because they’re so hungry that they can’t get enough to eat. So, you know, I think that’s something that selective breeding has caused, and I think we really need to reverse that. We need to allow chickens to live a bit longer and be less hungry in order to give them a somewhat higher level of welfare. That is, of course, if people are gonna eat them at all. If we didn’t eat them, we wouldn’t have this problem. One really neglected area of factory farming- which is absolutely huge in numbers- is what is euphemistically called “aquaculture,” but is in fact the very intensive factory farming of fish. And because of its growth, particularly in Asia, the factory farming of fish is now the largest form of factory farming of any vertebrate animal, larger than the 70 billion chickens. I’ve seen an estimate of 124 billion fish being raised each year. They’re extremely crowded, so I’m sure that many of them are suffering for that reason. Some fish like salmon, of course, have an instinct to migrate across the oceans. They can’t do that in an enclosed netted area, so they just swim endlessly in circles. And there’s no humane slaughter for fish in these factory farms, with the exception of a couple of small numbers in countries like Norway and the Netherlands, but generally not. So there’s an immense amount of suffering of the fish itself, but there’s one other factor that you have to think about. When we factory farm carnivorous fish, and again, salmon are a good example, obviously we have to feed them fish. So it’s not as if somehow we are saving the oceans by factory farming fish. On the contrary, the trawlers go out to catch low-value fish in huge numbers and kill them, again, no humane death, they die painfully, and grind them up and make them into pellets and feed them to the salmon. So if you buy a factory farm salmon, you are firstly buying a salmon that has had a miserable life in a factory farm. Secondly, according to an estimate I’ve seen, you are responsible for the death of 147 wild fish because that’s the average number of fish fed to a salmon in a factory farm before that salmon reaches market weight and is killed. So factory farm fish is not only huge in scale, and not only cruel for the fish, it’s contributing to the devastation of our oceans as well, and the cruel deaths of a very large number of wild fish.

– What is speciesism?

– When I use the term ‘speciesism,’ I mean an attitude of bias or prejudice against beings because of their species. And we could distinguish two forms of speciesism: One is anthropocentric speciesism, which is the main form. So when humans think that to have a moral status that means we should care about you or we should give weight to your interests and concerns, you have to be a member of the species Homo sapien. And if you’re a member of the species Homo sapien, great, you have rights, you have moral status, you are entitled to a certain amount of freedom, all of those things. But if you’re a member of another species, you don’t have rights, we don’t have to take your interests into account, we can do what we like with you. So that’s anthropocentric speciesism. There is another significant but not so crucial form of speciesism in our society, and that is the kind of speciesism that would be horrified if a person took a large dog and locked that dog up day and night in a crate so narrow that the dog could never turn around; and, you know, just put food in front of the dog once or twice a day so the dog could eat, and hosed away the dog’s feces, and otherwise just left the dog there. I think, you know, most people would be horrified. Maybe you would be convicted of cruelty to animals. But factory farmers, as I’ve been saying, can do that to millions of pigs, and, you know, nobody bats an eyelid. And what’s more, people then buy the products of these systems of pig production. So that’s a different kind of speciesism, but one that is also, I think, mistaken.

– How would one defend a speciesist argument?

– Most people are speciesist, and perhaps the first reaction people have when I say something like, “I don’t think that species should determine our moral status or how seriously we take people’s interests,” most people say, “Well, but we are rational beings and we can think about the future. And we’re different from non-human animals. And none of them can use language like I’m now using. They can’t discuss philosophical arguments. So doesn’t that show that we’re superior to them?” And of course it does show that we are superior to them in our intellectual capacities. I’m certainly not one to deny that. But the question is, does that really determine what a moral status is? Jeremy Bentham, who is the founder of Utilitarianism in the late 18th and early 19th century, responded to people who say just that, and said, “The question is not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?” And I think he was right about that. I think the capacity to suffer or feel pain is what is crucial. But he then went on to make a counter-argument against people who nevertheless say, “Well, it’s the ability to reason or to talk, whatever, that’s important.” And he said, “If that was so, then a horse or a dog would have more moral status, more rights than an infant of a day, a week, or even a month old.” And of course that’s true. If you’re talking about capacity to reason or capacity to communicate, there are many animals who do that better than any of us did when we were very young. Now, you might say to that, and Bentham didn’t consider this, you might say, “Well, yes, but when we were young, we had the potential to reason and to talk and all the rest of it, and that’s what’s important. It would’ve been wrong to harm us because of that potential.” Okay, but it’s an unfortunate fact about the world that not every member of the species Homo sapien does have the potential to reason or talk. Some humans are born with such severe abnormalities or such severe brain damage which might occur, say, through a brain hemorrhage if the baby is very premature, that we can predict that they will never be able to reason or talk, and never be able to live independently to anything like the extent that a non-human animal can or to, you know, deal with the environment and solve problems in the way that many non-human animals can. So if you really take that criterion of being able to reason or use language as a moral demarcation, it’s not speciesism anymore ’cause you’re not saying just because they’re a member of the human species, they have moral status, but it does have the problem that it leaves some non-human animals with a superior status to some human beings. So those animals who can, to some extent, reason and perhaps even communicate, so some chimpanzees learn to communicate with sign language, and other animals communicate with those of their own species in various ways, they would have a higher moral status than these irreparably and profoundly brain-damaged humans. But if someone suggested we ought to use these humans for experiments instead of animals, let’s say for experiments that would harm them or cause them pain or distress, as many of the experiments we do with animals cause those animals pain and distress, people would be horrified and would say, “No, that’s shocking. You mustn’t do that.” So I think that shows that really, they too think that it’s the capacity to suffer that matters, and you mustn’t do things to any being capable of suffering that is gonna make them suffer unless you have a really weighty, overriding reason for doing it. So I think that criteria, that way of drawing the distinction doesn’t really hold up between, you know, it doesn’t draw the boundary of moral significance around the species, so it’s not a defense of speciesism, it’s a defense of a different kind of view, which I also don’t find an attractive kind of view, but at least avoids speciesism.

– What is the main argument against speciesism in “Animal Liberation Now”?

– If I wanna characterize philosophically what I’m arguing as the ethics of how we ought to treat animals, I would say we ought to apply the principle of equal consideration of similar interests. So equal consideration of interests is often put forward by philosophers as a principle of equality as one form of the idea of why humans are equal, because they’re all entitled to equal consideration of interests. And I think that extends beyond the human species. Any being with interests in the sense of being able to feel pain and therefore have an interest in not suffering or being able to enjoy their life and therefore have an interest in pleasure and enjoyment, those interests ought to be taken into account, and they ought to be given equal weight with the similar interests of other beings, human or non-human. Now, it’s true that the interest of humans may not always be similar to those of non-human animals, so it doesn’t follow from equal consideration of similar interests that it’s as bad to kill any non-human animal, whether it’s a dog or a pig or a rat, as it is to kill a human being who’s capable of reasoning, thought, self-awareness, and planning for the future. I think there’s a reasonable argument to say it’s worse to kill beings who are capable of anticipating their future, planning for their future, working towards that, because when you do that, it means that everything I’ve done up to that point that’s been future-directed- like, maybe you’ve been studying, maybe you’ve been working towards a degree, maybe you’ve been thinking what you would do when you graduate- if you’re killed, let’s say just as you graduate, all of that planning has been for naught. And you can’t say that about killing a dog or a sheep or a rat. I don’t think they plan in that way. They may have some anticipation of the future, but it’s more short-term. So equal consideration of similar interest does mean equal weight for pain. Essentially, it means pain is pain no matter what the species. Pleasure is pleasure no matter what the species. But where interests differ, you can reasonably give different weight to those different interests.

– How are factory farm practices justified by the agribusiness industry?

– The agribusiness industry justifies what it does by saying it’s producing cheap food for people who wanna buy it. And that has to be admitted is true. I mean, you can ask questions about whether this is wholesome food, and of course you have to point out that when it says cheap, it means the consumer pays less for it than they would if they gave animals better lives. That’s why it is as it is. It’s a free-market competition, and that drives all the producers to stay in business to sell at the lowest price. And that’s really what is behind the horrendous things that we do to animals today. But of course it’s not cheap for the animals, and that’s obvious. It’s not cheap for the local environment. That’s obvious, because factory farms are major polluters of waterways. There are many places in countries where, you know, older people say, “I used to be able to swim in that river.” But now there’s a factory farm upstream. The manure often washes off, even, if they put it in so-called lagoons. When it rains a lot, it washes in. So there’s pollution, fish kills, all the rest of it. And if you happen to be living within a few miles of a factory farm, when the wind blows in your direction, they stink. And if you’re too close, you get millions of flies as well. So they’re not cheap for everyone, but they’re cheap between the producer and the consumer. And of course, in one sense they’re not cheap for anyone in the world because they’re contributing to climate change, and so they’re harming the entire planet, all of the beings on it, by imposing costs on them. And we all know, we see those costs everywhere in the world. So for example, you see it in wildfires like in the western United States and Canada and Australia. You see it in floods occurring in places that are unprecedented in a number of different countries. You see it in more intense tropical storms, and you see it in droughts ruining the lives of many people in low-income, arid, and semi-arid countries. So there is in fact an immense cost for factory farming, but the justification that it’s cheap only works as long as you don’t build those costs into the true cost of the product. And if we did, if we tried to cost out all those harms, we would see that it’s actually a very expensive product indeed. The reason that factory-farmed food is not really cheap despite being cheap to the consumer is that it has many ‘externalities,’ to use the term that economists use, which means costs imposed on third parties, costs that are not imposed on the producer or the purchaser, in this case the consumer, but are imposed on people whose rivers are polluted, people whose air is polluted by factory farms, and people who are affected by climate change. All the people in the world have a cost imposed on them by climate change. And because the meat industry contributes to that, that’s an externality of the meat industry that is not built into the price that the consumer pays at the cash register.

– How do factory farm conditions lead to employee churn?

– The other victims of factory farming, apart from the animals and those affected by the environmental damage and climate change, are the workers. This is a really unpleasant job. I’ve been inside factory farms, I’ve been inside chicken farms, for example, and pig farms. When you walk into the chicken shed, the first thing you notice is that your eyes start to sting and your throat feels bad. And that’s because there’s so much ammonia in the air from all of the birds’ droppings that are just allowed to accumulate for months, sometimes for more than a year, in the shed. So naturally, the workers don’t wanna spend a lot of time in the shed, but they have to spend some time. They’re handling these chickens all the time. They’re pulling out the dead ones, the corpses. It’s a really unpleasant job. They’re often immigrants, sometimes undocumented immigrants, poorly paid, and, you know, they leave at an enormous rate, there’s a huge churn. And slaughterhouses, for example, too, the whole workforce is churned over within a year. There are people who’ve got jobs in slaughterhouses in order to observe what’s going on. Timothy Pachirat wrote a book called “Every Twelve Seconds,” which is how often a cow got killed in the slaughterhouse he was working in. And when he rang up and said, “I’m looking for work, do you have openings?” they just said, “Just come along, we’ve got openings all the time,” because there are always employees leaving. So I think it’s harmful to their health, both physical and mental, to work in factory farming or slaughterhouse industries, and it’s certainly a poorly paid job which can really be damaging to those who are working there. There are some organizations that are concerned about the working conditions of people in factory farms, but it’s a neglected issue, I would say, compared to those who are trying to improve labor conditions for people working in urban and suburban areas. I think the people who are working in rural areas on factory farms are harder to get to, not really, you know, possible to unionize, and so I think it’s a neglected area of worker well-being.

– How much of an oppositional force is big agribusiness?

– Agribusiness opposition to changing what it’s doing takes many different forms. The most potent of them, I guess, is being a political lobby. And that’s especially influential in the United States where money plays a much bigger role in politics than it does in parliamentary democracies like those in the European Union, United Kingdom, or Australia. And I think that’s the main reason why the European Union and the United Kingdom and to some extent Australia have been able to pass through the usual political channels, through parliament, legislation on a national level, or in the case of the European Union on a transnational level, that does not exist federally in the United States and does not exist in the great majority, at least three-quarters, of the states of the United States. And the interesting fact is that legislation requiring that animals have enough space to turn around or stretch their limbs exists predominantly in states that have the possibility of citizens bringing a referendum to vote on an issue- and California is the best example of that. So California has had two separate referendums on improving conditions for farmed animals, and both of them have passed very easily with around 63%, 64% of the votes. And in Massachusetts, in fact, a more recent referendum passed with 78% of the vote. So if you put these issues up before voters and you inform them as to how animals live, and you ask them, “Do you wanna support that or do you wanna oppose it?” a great majority will say, “No, I don’t wanna support that. I wanna stop it.” Even though the agribusiness industry is telling them this will make your meat and eggs and dairy cost more. But still they’ll say, “Okay, I’ll put my hand up for that. If it costs a bit more, nevermind. I don’t wanna see animals treated like that.” But when you try to translate that into political will to get something through either federal Congress or other state congresses where there’s no possibility of a referendum, in the United States that just doesn’t seem to work. And I think that’s a real problem. Another avenue that the pork producers took recently was to try to strike down California’s Proposition 12, or at least the part of it that stopped them selling their pork into California when the pigs did not have room to turn around, and they took it to court, and the Supreme Court, to its credit, and I haven’t agreed with a lot of recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court, but on this occasion it rejected the pork producers’ view and said that California has the right to decide what kinds of pork chops will be sold in California, including issues about the well-being of the animals as they were raised before they were turned into those pork chops.

– Why do people still consume animal products?

– Upton Sinclair said, “It’s difficult to get a person to understand something if their income depends on them not understanding it.” And I would adapt that to the question of why is it so hard to get people to change what they eat? I think it’s difficult to get people to understand something if they believe that their dinner or the dinner that they prefer to eat depends on them not understanding it. Now, you know, I would say as somebody who’s been a vegetarian for more than 50 years now and vegan for a number of years too, I would say, “Look, there’s plenty of great meals around. You don’t need to eat meat. You don’t even need to eat animal products to eat well and be healthy and feel great.” But food is something that people seem very conservative about. They seem very reluctant to change what they eat, and it’s embedded in our culture and our traditions. You know, when people have special occasions like Thanksgiving, you traditionally have a turkey. So people have special meals for family birthdays, and they eat with their family and they think, “Well, if I change, then I wouldn’t be able to eat what the family’s eating.” So there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of conformity, I think, in terms of not getting ahead of others. So it’s difficult. I think it could get easier if we had enough people who were not eating meat, and that is starting to happen. This is the positive sign, that in the last decade or so we’ve seen a lot more people going vegetarian and vegan. We’ve seen a lot more of these convenience vegan foods in the supermarkets. More and more restaurants have vegan options. So it is getting easier, and I’m hopeful that that will mean more people start to join. And that’s part of the reason for writing “Animal Liberation Now,” to encourage more people to join. And if they do, it’ll get easier for others to join as well.

– How expensive would meat be if animals were treated humanely?

– Economists have offered varying estimates on how much animal products would increase if you treated the animals differently. To some extent, we can get an idea by looking at those products where there is a reasonable scale of production in an alternative- and the best one there is eggs. Now, in the United States, eggs are not terribly well labeled. What you can get either is the standard kind of eggs, which will be coming from hens kept in cages, and you can get eggs that are labeled cage-free. But cage-free covers a wide variety of systems. It covers systems in which the hens are not in cages, but they are still locked into a big shed, maybe, you know, 5,000, 10,000 birds in a single shed. Very crowded. It’s better than being in a cage for a hen, I believe, but not a lot better. And then you can have genuinely free-range systems where the birds are able to go outside when they wish to, when the stocking density is low enough so that that outside area actually can still grow grass, ’cause if you get a lot of hens per acre, they’ll kill the grass. But if you keep the stocking density low, you can have grass, you can have insects there. The hens have something to do, chasing insects and so on. They can dust bathe on the dirt run, which is something that hens have an instinctive desire to do, and of course they can’t do in a wire cage. And they can form a social flock. The social flock for a hen is maybe 30, 40, 50 birds. It’s not thousands of birds in a shed. So where free-range eggs are clearly labeled, you get some idea of the price difference, and they certainly can be twice the price of caged hen eggs. And the ones that are cage-free, sometimes they’re called barn eggs, but not outside, will be somewhere in between those margins. So yes, there is a premium to pay, but a lot of people say they like the eggs better anyway. The eggs taste better and are healthier for them, they believe. And the same, I think, is true for meat production, that it’s more expensive, generally, for example, to not bring cows into a feedlot and feed them on grain. You can buy grass-fed beef. It’s generally more expensive. And incidentally from a climate point of view, it doesn’t help at all. It’s just as bad or perhaps even worse than feedlot beef. But from an animal welfare point of view, it’s certainly definitely better. And as for free-range chicken, it’s really hard to find and it is much more expensive, no question about that. So if in fact people wanted to keep eating meat and other animal products, but wanted to avoid factory farm products, their food would be more expensive. Depending on what it was, it might be 20%, 30%, 40% more expensive, or it might be 100% more expensive. But I think that they would appreciate it more and meat would become more of a treat, more of a special occasion that people looked forward to if they were gonna eat meat. And generally I think they would also be healthier because I have no doubt that we eat far too much in the way of animal products, and a lot of medical experts agree with that. The Lancet, which is one of the top two medical journals in the world, ran a commission, brought a lot of health experts together, and they said that a high meat diet is bad for people’s health in terms of heart disease and cancers of the digestive system. So we could envisage a different society in which some people still ate some meat less often, better quality, more expensive, and lived longer and healthier lives. And certainly, the local environments would be much better as well.

– What are conscientious omnivores?

– There are some people who accept my arguments against factory farming, but say they still think it’s okay to eat meat if it comes from animals who’ve had good lives. They call themselves “conscientious omnivores.” And I think this is a possibly defensible position if they really are conscientious about where they’re getting their animal products from. But it’s quite difficult. Depending where you live, what country you’re in, it can be really difficult to get genuinely animal welfare-friendly products, by which I mean products where you can really be assured that the animals had pleasant lives without significant suffering/distress before they were slaughtered, and that they were slaughtered in a way that didn’t involve the ordeal of being trucked to the slaughterhouse and killed in ways that might not be humane either. So I would question whether you can believe every label you see on a product that might say certified humane. I think you can’t. But if you either can rear some animals yourself if you have land, or if you live in a rural area and you know some farmers who bring up animals in ways that you think of are acceptable, then that’s possible to do. And somewhat reluctantly, I suppose, I would see conscientious omnivores as allies in the movement against factory farming, which I do think is the most important of the movements that I would like to inspire and reinvigorate through the publication of “Animal Liberation Now.” If that book helped to bring about the unwinding and the end of factory farming, but there was still a number of people who were conscientious omnivores, I could die content. I might not have achieved everything that I wanted to, but I would’ve achieved the most important thing that I want to achieve through “Animal Liberation Now.”

– Who else has accompanied you in this work?

– I’m proud to include myself as one among a number of people who have really made us more aware of animals, and also more aware of the things that we do to animals that are wrong. A lot of people will know the work of Temple Grandin, who’s made an impact, but I’d also like to talk about Ruth Harrison, who’s no longer with us but wrote the very first book on factory farming, a book that I read; it was a book called “Animal Machines.” Jane Goodall of course helped us to understand that some non-human animals are really thinking, caring beings with close relationships and rich emotional lives. I want to thank pioneers like Ingrid Newkirk who founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and also the late Henry Spira, a close friend of mine who was a real pioneer in strategies in the animal movement and helped to persuade a large number of corporations to move away from testing cosmetics on animals, and led to a lot of other important changes for animals as well. So yeah, I think we’ve been able to do quite a lot, but there is a lot more that needs to be done, and I’m looking towards the next generations of leaders who will continue to carry on this fight, and I hope will bring it to a successful conclusion.

– What does progress over the next 48 years look like to you?

– If I go back to the publication of “Animal Liberation” in 1975, and look at those 48 years, we made some progress but we also lost some ground because of the spread of factory farming into other countries. What will happen in the next 48 years? I think that there is a good hope that we will actually make much more progress than we made in the past 48 years, and that’s because I think we are going to be able to have the ability to produce a lot of foods which will be more closely resembling meat, and in some cases actually may be meat, but will not come from animals. I’m thinking here both of plant-based products of which we already have a number, like the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat, but they need to come down in price in order to compete with meat. But I’m also thinking of meat grown at the cellular level, or cultured meat, which will be real meat for those who want to continue to eat meat but will never have come from an animal and will have a drastically reduced carbon footprint from meat from animals. So I think those factors, plus continued pushing for understanding of animals and understanding of the ethics of why the way we treat animals is wrong, plus greater understanding of the health benefits of eating fewer animals or none at all, I believe that all of those factors can come together so that over the next 48 years we can look forward to a future in which we are no longer confining animals on a vast scale to raise them for food, and we also then become more enlightened about their use in research. Perhaps we’ll have replaced that too with cell cultures and AI methods of testing our products. So I hope we can move to a better ethical world in which we extend the boundary of equal consideration of interests to all sentient beings. And while inevitably there will be some conflicts between humans and animals, if we consider their interests as counting in the way that the interest of humans count, I’m sure that we can achieve a much more peaceful world and end the enslavement, cruelty, and effectively war that humans have been conducting on animals for a very long time.

– Part II: The impact of AI on animals. What concerns do you have around AI development?

– There are quite a few things that concern me about AI and the speed with which it is developing and may continue to develop. It’s something of an unknown, and that always seems to be a problem. It clearly has both positive and negative aspects. I mean, we all use AI, we benefit from it. I used it to give me transport directions to get to where we’re making this video now. And yeah, great. But there are a lot of factors, and some of those concerns are relatively short-term social concerns. Many people are concerned about the possibility that AI is going to cause widespread unemployment, that it will be able to do a lot of jobs that people are doing now, and what will those people do then? And of course some people say, “Well, it’ll free them up from the boring routine jobs that AI can do, and they will then be able to do more creative and productive things.” Of course that assumes that there’s a system that will pay them for doing the more creative and productive things, and we have to hope there is. University and college professors like me are concerned about whether students will use AI to write papers and will cheat, and we are thinking about how to prevent that. But, you know, these are sort of practical and fairly immediate concerns. There are other broader concerns that are somewhat more philosophical. One is about whether AI could become more intelligent than us, a super-intelligent, artificial general intelligence. We don’t have that yet, but we could get it sometime in the future. And then there are reasonable concerns about will we be able to control it if it’s smarter than us? The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has a kind of fable about a group of sparrows who think that it would be terrific if they had an owl to help them with some labor tasks; owls are much bigger and stronger than they are. And so they think about getting an owl egg and hatching the owl and then training the owl to do what they want. And there’s one wise old sparrow who says, “Well, before we actually hatch this egg, shouldn’t we make sure that we can train the owl to do what we want?” And the other sparrows say, “Oh no, don’t let’s delay this.’ Let’s get on and it’s gonna be so wonderful, so let’s keep going.” The point of the fable, of course, is that owls eat sparrows, and once you have hatched an owl, the sparrows are not gonna be able to control it. So is AI, a super intelligent AI, going to be like the owl would’ve been to the sparrows? That’s a concern, and that’s why some people are now calling for a pause in the development of AI so that we can control it. There are quite a number of people working on ways of controlling it. That’s something else that is a concern to find how do you find those ways of controlling it. Do we know enough about how that will be possible, given that we haven’t yet got to the stage of super intelligence, so we don’t don’t know quite enough? And, you know, there are in a way two different sorts of thoughts here. One is that this super intelligence might not be aligned with our values, so it might have values of its own and might find that we are an obstacle or a nuisance, and therefore might deliberately set out to eliminate us on its path to the values that it has. And it’s also possible that the AI will be just misprogrammed. Some example, sort of simplistic example that’s been suggested is maybe we just program the AI to make paperclips, but there’s a little bug in the system and it makes paperclips out of everything. It doesn’t have anything that stops it using all and every material to make paperclips, and because it’s highly intelligent at making paperclips, if we try to stop it, it foils us, so we end up getting made into paperclips as well. So there’s sort of different ways in which the AI could be misaligned with human interests. So those are some of the major concerns that people are talking about. I have some concerns of my own. One of those concerns is about the impact of AI on animals. I’ve for a long time been concerned about the ethics of how we treat animals, and when you look at past technologies, they have always been used to the disadvantage of animals in various ways. So, you know, we invented the wheel, a great invention, of course, to help us move around, but that means that we’ve tied horses and oxen and various other animals, effectively enslaved them to pull the carts that we’ve made with wheels. And we built fences that we constrain animals with and keep them in pastures. So similarly with AI, we are already using it on animals in a variety of ways. So factory farms are starting to use AI to run factory farms and to remove humans even further from the animals in the factory farms. AI drones are being used to intentionally kill feral animals, and not necessarily to kill them in the most humane ways. This is, for example, done in New Zealand where there are feral possums that had been imported from Australia for fur, but they’re damaging to New Zealand’s native forests, which never had possums, so drones are being used to kill them. And in general, when you look at studies of AI ethics, it tends to talk about AI must be used for human benefit, but I don’t think that’s enough. I think we share this planet with other species who are capable of feeling pain and whose interests must be counted, so I think that statements of AI ought to instead talk about AI being used for the benefit of all sentient beings. And it’s interesting that if you look at discussions of AI ethics in journals, there’s a journal, for example, called AI and Ethics, you’ll find a lot of discussions about the ethics of what we should do if AI becomes conscious, if we develop an artificial intelligence that is itself a conscious sentient being. And that is another interesting and important philosophical question, both how would we know that the AI is really a conscious being, and what would its moral status be? Would its moral status be similar to that of humans? Would it be more like animals? Or would it still be a tool we could use as we pleased? But it strikes me as a little strange that AI is already interacting with millions of animals, and, you know, will continue to interact in a whole range of different ways. Autonomous vehicles, for example, will interact with animals on the road. Will they swerve to avoid animals, or will they only swerve to avoid humans on the road? You know, you can easily multiply the questions about AI and animals. But whereas that’s an actual ethical question already facing us, the question about the moral status or rights of conscious artificial intelligence is still a hypothetical question. I’m convinced we haven’t got there yet. And generally speaking, those who are more knowledgeable than I am about AI agree with that. There are some people who get into chats with ChatGPT and they come away thinking that they’ve actually been having a conversation with a being who is conscious and has desires and inclinations- but that’s really a clever kind of deceit. ChatGPT has been fed billions of pages of text and understands how humans speak and react, and can regurgitate that or reshape it appropriately for the context, and then write it out very rapidly. But when we understand how ChatGPT and similar AIs work, there’s no reason to believe that they are conscious or that they’re, you know, particularly intelligent. You can quite often get them saying things that are pretty foolish, in fact. So I think that we should be focusing more on the question of the ethics of AI relating to animals than we are focusing now, in addition to, of course, what will no doubt eventually be an important question, and that is, how can we tell if an AI is conscious, and what kind of moral status would it then have?

– How would you define consciousness in non-human animals?

– When I refer to animals as being conscious or being sentient beings, I mean that they are subjects of experience. And to say that something is a subject of an experience is to say there’s something that is like for them to have that experience. So if something happens to me, if somebody splashes hot water on my hand, too hot for me to, you know, be comfortable with, I have a painful sensation and I feel that, I experience it; there’s something that it’s like to be me with a slightly burned hand. If you splash boiling water on a rock, the rock has no experiences. There’s nothing that it’s like to be a rock with hot water splashed over it. It has no experiences. It’s not a subject of consciousness. Many animals, I believe, are subjects of experience. They’re conscious. Not necessarily all animals. I’m agnostic about some insects, for example. Maybe they’re conscious, but it’s hard to know. Maybe their movements are somehow more like that of automata than conscious beings. But I would give them the benefit of the doubt when I can. What about an oyster, for example? An oyster has a very rudimentary nervous system, more so than insects. And moreover, oysters don’t move, so to me it’s unlikely that oysters are conscious beings because why would they have evolved a sense of pain if they can’t move away from the pain? So not all animals are conscious, but I think a very large number of them definitely are conscious, and a huge number may be conscious. With AI, the problem is gonna be how can we tell? How can we tell whether it’s mimicking consciousness, as I believe ChatGPT is, or whether it’s genuinely conscious?

– Will sentient AI force us to alter our attitudes towards technology?

– As we continue to develop AI, and particularly as we develop artificial general intelligence, I think it’s quite likely that at some point we will create a conscious being. I don’t know when that will happen, but I don’t see any reason in principle why if we can have consciousness in a biological carbon-based life form, like I am, which has developed a brain and neurons, I don’t see any in principle reason why you couldn’t get something similar happening in something that isn’t a carbon-based life form, that is made of silicon chips. So I think that’s possible. And if we do that, we will have created an artificial conscious being. Of course, we’ve already created vast numbers of conscious beings. We’re creating animals all the time, and we vary them in their nature by breeding. So it’s not the first time we’ve created conscious beings, but it’s the first time we’ve created an artificial conscious being. And the question is then, will we treat them as the other non-human conscious beings we’ve created, who basically, we have mostly exploited for our particular purposes, as using them for labor like horses and oxen, or rearing them for food like cows and pigs and chickens and fish now we’re rearing in large numbers? So I think that there is a danger that we will, but I’m hopeful that we will realize, if we do create conscious AI, that that conscious being has interests, an interest in not feeling pain, an interest in enjoying their life once you have consciousness, and that it would be wrong to disregard the interests of that conscious being and simply to treat it as another tool or another slave. Now, it’s possible that we’ll realize as we get close to creating this conscious being that we would then have to give it rights and would not be able to use it in some way. And we might perhaps halt what we’re doing at that point just below the level of consciousness, or maybe at a very dull level of consciousness where the AI is not really experiencing pleasure or pain because it’s not capable of that; it’s just got some sort of more neutral, sort of more state of consciousness, if you like. That’s possible. And then maybe it wouldn’t really have interests we have to worry about. But I certainly think that if we did create beings that were more like non-human animals, we ought to treat them much better than we now treat non-human animals. And of course, I also think we ought to change the treatment of non-human animals in order to do that.

– Who will decide how we treat conscious AI?

– The question of how we treat sentient AI is going to be one both for everybody as individuals, just as the question of how we treat animals is one for people as individuals. Are we going to want to have, for a companion animal, a dog or a cat and treat them well? Are we going to buy products from factory farms, which means we’re supporting cruelty? Those are individual questions. But there are also national government policy issues. And just as I believe governments should set standards for animal welfare, they should not permit the treatment of animals in the way they’re now treated in factory farms, so I would think governments will need to set standards for the treatment of sentient, conscious AI once we get to that point. And yeah, it’ll be a novel question. Maybe they’ll set up committees of experts. I can imagine committees which consist of people who are expert in the AI and in the nature of the AI, experts knowledgeable about consciousness itself in those neurosciences relevant to that, but also to have philosophers along and lawyers, perhaps, to help crafting policies and frameworks for this. So I think it will be an interesting task for who knows when; maybe the middle of the 21st century, there might be committees doing this.

– Part III: The importance and obstacles behind good philanthropy. Who is Zell Kravinsky?

– Zell Kravinsky was an interesting man who had an ability to make money from real estate investments. It’s not what he originally did; he did a PhD in literature. But he found that he had this ability to buy properties that were rundown and people were not valuing and to resell them. So he made quite a lot of money at that- I think he made something like $40 million- and this was quite a few years ago, about 20 years ago, so it was a lot of money then. But he didn’t really want the money. He was quite comfortable living with his family in a suburban home near Philadelphia. And so he decided that he would give almost all of it away. He kept enough to live, you know, in modest comfort and enough to ensure that his family would be okay; he had children and a wife. But gave a lot of it away and did good with it, gave it away to health charities basically. But when he had done that, he came across an article which said that there are people waiting for kidneys in the United States. And the wait if you need a kidney is very long. These people may be on dialysis, but the quality of life on dialysis is very poor, and many of them actually die before they can get a kidney to be transplanted. So Zell decided to start looking at the possibility of donating a kidney, even though this was not to a relative or loved one, as most kidney donations are. He thought that he could donate a kidney to a stranger, and he checked what the risk of dying from a kidney donation or dying from only having one kidney rather than two was, and he discovered that it was surprisingly small. On his estimate, it was only a 1 in 4,000 chance that donating a kidney would lead to his premature death. So he went to a hospital in Philadelphia and told them that he wanted to donate a kidney to a stranger. It was a hospital that dealt primarily with African American people- he was not African American. And they looked at him as if he was a bit crazy, and he had to struggle for quite a while to convince them that he was serious. And they still put him through a lot of psychological tests to see that he wasn’t crazy. But eventually he did persuade them that he would like to donate a kidney to just the next person in line who was compatible with his kidney. And he knew that his wife was not gonna be very happy with that, so he actually snuck out and did it and came home and told her he’d done it. And his kidney saved a life, and he’s happy that it saved a life. And he thinks that if he hadn’t done that, he would’ve been valuing his own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger. And there’s no justification for doing that. So there was an article written about him in the New Yorker, which I read, and I contacted him, and got him to speak to my class as part of a discussion that we have about something that is called ‘effective altruism.’ The term effective altruism actually is something that developed after Zell Kravinsky had donated both his money and his kidney, but it does describe what he did, although he certainly is way out there as an outlier because not only did he give away most of his money, but he gave away one of his kidneys.

– What is the effective altruism movement?

– Effective altruism is a movement that encourages altruism, as the name would suggest, and suggests that if you are gonna be altruistic, then you should try to be as effective as you can with what you’re doing. So whatever your resources are, they might be money, they might be time, they might even be one of your kidneys, but if you are going to donate something like that, make sure it does the most good that it can. Don’t waste it. So, you know, we all have this attitude to everyday purchases. If your phone has died and you need a new phone, you’re gonna ask around or go online, see what’s a recommended phone that has the features that you want at a price that you’re willing to pay. And if you came home and showed your phone to a friend and your friend said, “How much did you pay for that?” And you tell ’em, they say, “What? I could have got that for you for half the price.” You’d feel pretty stupid. But strangely, that attitude doesn’t apply to charities. So if you go and give your money to a charity, let’s say it’s a charity that’s raising guide dogs for blind people, and you don’t do research before you do that, you don’t ask, “Is there some other way I could help blind people that would help more people for less money?” If you did ask that, you would find that giving money for guide dogs is not the best value for your money because it costs a lot of money to raise a guide dog. It costs about $40,000 in the U.S. to train a guide dog to help people who are blind. It’s a good thing to do, but you can restore sight in someone who has cataracts for maybe $100 or something around that if they’re living in a low-income country and they can’t afford to get cataract procedures. And you can prevent people from going blind from trachoma, which is a preventable cause of blindness, for probably a similar kind of sum, maybe even less. So what that suggests is, if you wanna do good, do some research, go online, look at websites which talk about these issues, find the most effective charities, and give to them. That’s what effective altruism is about.

– How does human nature impact good philanthropy?

– When you ask people to give money, some people respond very positively, very generously, and especially, you know, some people realize that they have more money than they need and that giving something away is not really gonna have a dramatic effect on their life. I’m talking obviously about people who are middle class or above, not people who are struggling in poverty. But there are other people who, even though they clearly have more money than they need, and maybe so much money that they wouldn’t notice giving away some thousands of dollars anyway, nevertheless, you know, will look at you as if that’s a crazy idea, as if to say, “Well, why would you give money away? I’ve earned this money. I’ve worked hard to earn it.” And that may be true. They may have worked hard to earn it. But it’s also true, of course, that they’ve been really fortunate in being in a position and a society where they could earn a lot of money and where their talents could be useful. Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, has put that quite well. He said, you know, “Yes, I had some talents, but if I had been born in a village in rural Peru, these talents wouldn’t have gotten me very far.” So he attributes his enormous fortune, at least in part, to the luck that he was born where he was and could use those skills. So I’m not clear why people are so inclined to hoard money. It must be some kind of innate instinct, I believe. Maybe that’s, you know, our species evolved in circumstances when we were able to store food. You know, we developed kinds of foods that we could store. And hard times were unpredictable. There might be droughts and famines. So it was good to increase our hoard of food if we wanted to survive and we wanted our family to survive. And somehow, the genes for doing that remain in us, even though we live in societies where we can have far more than we are ever gonna need, and we can safely put some of it away for for hard times- I’m not against people putting things away in case things get economically tougher- but we can do that with some of our wealth, and we can be quite confident that we’ll have enough, and we may still have more even beyond what we need to prepare for the future.

– What are metacharities?

– Because effective altruism puts this emphasis not just on being altruistic, but on also making sure that we are effective in whatever we do, it’s given rise to what are called “metacharities,” that is, organizations that are themselves charities but whose job is to evaluate other charities and to try to find which are the ones that will give you the best value for money. So let me give you some examples. If you want to help people in extreme poverty, there are a lot of organizations working to help people in poverty all over the world. How are you gonna find the best ones, the ones that can be independently assessed and shown to be giving you great value for every dollar that you give? Well, you don’t have to do the research yourself, fortunately, because over the last 20 years or so, organizations have sprung up to do this for you. As a matter of fact, I co-founded one of them, and it’s called The Life You Can Save, and it curates a list of, I think it’s currently 23 vetted, independently assessed charities that you can rely on to give you good value for money. Just go to thelifeyoucansave.org to find them. GiveWell is another organization that has done a lot of the research, very basic research, to find the best charities helping people in extreme poverty. So that’s another good place to go to. And if you’re interested in the field of trying to reduce the suffering of animals, you can go to Animal Charity Evaluators. They evaluate a number of different charities and particular fields of charity. In fact, animal welfare is a particularly important area to go to if you wanna donate to it, because there’s this huge imbalance in the amount of money that goes to the animals people care about most, namely dogs and cats, and the amount of money that goes to the animals who suffer most in the huge quantities. And that’s factory-farmed animals in particular. So you have a tiny percentage of suffering animals in stray and abused dogs and cats getting the majority of the money, whereas a small portion of the money goes to the vast majority of animals who need our help the most. So that distortion is really a good example of the need to think about effective altruism or effective animal welfare, and not just about helping to reduce animal suffering.

– What is “earning-to-give?”

– Another thing that effective altruists have done apart from setting up organizations which inform people about how to give most effectively, another important decision that many people make, especially young people, is what are they gonna do in their career? And effective altruists have seen this as another area in which it’s important to have information, not only the standard kind of career counseling, which might advise you about what skills do you have, what professions are you likely to succeed in, what professions are you likely to enjoy, but also, what kind of career will do the most good? Because for many people, that is an interest. Many people have an interest in doing good, and they wanna do good through their career, through their work, as well as in other ways. After all, you spend a lot of time in your career, and according to one calculation that was made, the average person spends 80,000 hours over their lifetime working in their career. So using that statistic, effective altruists set up an organization called 80,000 Hours, and you can find it online, 80000hours.org. And there you get a lot of information about different careers. Now, one of the careers that was less obvious to some people than others was that a career in which you do a lot of good might be a career in which you earn a lot of money. And for example, you might go into the finance sector in order to earn a lot of money. “Now, why would that do good?” people say. Many people sort of pushed back and said, “Hey, wait a minute. You know, if you’re going to Wall Street or the equivalent, whatever country you’re in, you’re not doing good. You may even be doing quite a lot of harm.” But the argument that was put forward was that the more money you have, the more money you can give. And if you are prepared to go into finance, and you rapidly earn six-figure and then later seven-figure salaries or income, and you continue to live fairly modestly, you don’t change your lifestyle and habits, so you don’t need to sort of get rid of your ordinary kind of Toyota and trade it up for a Ferrari or anything of that sort, then you’re gonna have a lot of money to give away, and you can do a lot of good with it, and you can carefully select the best charities to work with. So there’s an argument there. Still, some people thought that you’re likely to be doing bad things in your work in order to get this money, and that will offset the good that you do with the charities. Of course, that’s possible in some cases. If you went into finance and somebody said, “Here’s a company that wants to develop a lot more coal mines, so let’s help them raise money to have more coal mines,” I think you ought to say, “No, the world does not need more coal mines. We need to close coal mines and close coal-fired power generation because it’s killing the climate of our planet.” But of course you don’t have to be doing that, and I’ve had students at Princeton who have gone into earning-for-give, and I’ve talked to one of those students in particular and asked him whether he thinks that what he does does any harm, and he says no. Basically, he’s trying to earn money for investors, but the way in which he’s doing it is trying to predict which commodities will rise and which commodities will fall. And if he succeeds, then the investors make more money and he gets a big bonus, but it doesn’t really affect the market. His company’s not big enough to be distorting the market in whatever it is they’re buying or selling, so it doesn’t really have any other significant effects. In fact, he thought maybe the operations of his company and others like it means that prices don’t jump and fall as sharply, but rather they’re more smoother curves, and that probably is less disturbing for those who need those commodities. So I think that’s sometimes the case, and that might therefore be a good kind of career. But in fact there’s been a bit of a swing in the effective altruism movement towards saying, “Well, even if it’s true that you can earn a lot of money through earning to give, if you have a lot of talent and it’s the kind of talent that could help a new charity or maybe could do some research that would solve an important problem like helping to produce clean energy or food, plant food plants that will withstand droughts, or solve diseases, maybe the real bottleneck in some important causes is not money, but talent.” So my impression is that while earning-to-give got a lot of publicity in the early days of effective altruism, it’s actually no longer emphasized nearly as much in the effective altruism movement as it used to be.

– How does effective altruism address inequality?

– Effective altruists have been encouraging of high net worth individuals when they give, and for obvious reasons. People like Bill and Melinda Gates have done a huge amount of good in the world through setting up the Gates Foundation, saving millions of lives. You know, I think it’s pretty clear that things that the Gates Foundation does, for example, funding the extension of vaccination and immunization against various diseases, preventing deaths from diarrhea, which has been a common killer, work towards developing a vaccine against malaria, there are a lot of things that they’ve done that have saved a very large number of lives- and that’s true of some other high net worth individuals as well. And in the field of effective altruism itself, I think Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, who set up a foundation that looks for the best causes and funds charities in a whole range of fields from global poverty to animal welfare, to trying to reduce risks of species extinction- I think they’ve done an immense amount of good too. But some people are troubled by the connection between effective altruists and high net worth individuals because they see effective altruism as not tackling the inequality in the world which they see as perhaps the basic cause or a cause of extreme poverty. I don’t myself really accept that objection. For one thing, what to me is important is that we raise the minimum level at the bottom, that we try to make everybody moderately well-off so that nobody is starving, nobody is dying from lack of basic healthcare, everybody can live a life in some dignity and self-respect, everybody can educate their children, including their girls- unfortunately, in parts of the world still, sometimes poorer people will send their boys to school but not their girls- so everybody should have access to contraception if they want to use it, and to reproductive healthcare. There’s a whole lot of things like that. And to me, you know, if that happens, but there are still some individuals who are much, much wealthier than all the rest, I’m not gonna be that bothered by it. You know, you might still say, “Well, we could make those who are worse-off, better-off by redistributing the wealth of those who are very wealthy,” but it probably wouldn’t make much difference anymore once you’ve got people above those levels of serious poverty, and it might well stifle innovation because there’s no doubt that private foundations like the Gates Foundation and Open Philanthropy, the one that Moskovitz and Tuna have set up, can be more innovative and more daring than governments generally are- governments tend to be more risk-averse. So there are some benefits in having some philanthropic people who are wealthy and are free to waste their own money if they are prepared to take risks. You know, you take risks, sometimes what you do will be wasted. Sometimes it will pay off enormously in ways that are more cautious ways of trying to solve problems would not succeed.

– How do you present effective altruism to young earners?

– Effective altruism is not only for the rich, obviously. Effective altruists pay more attention to the risk because the returns in terms of doing good in the world are gonna be much greater. But I’m certainly interested in encouraging everyone who has something to spare, who spends some money on things that they don’t really need, to think about people in extreme poverty who are worse-off than they are and have nothing to spend on things that they don’t really need because they don’t even have enough to spend on the things they do really need. So let’s say that you buy a bottled water when there’s safe water coming out of the tap, or let’s say you go and sit in a cafe to drink some coffee when you could have made coffee at home for less money. You are spending something on a luxury. You’re spending something on something you don’t need. So you can think about, “Is there something else I could be doing with this that is better? Could I be saving up what I would save by drinking the water out of the tap and over a year having something to give?” Or by larger expenditures, most of us spend a lot more on frivolities than just those things. And so I suggest in my book, “The Life You Can Save,” which incidentally you can download free from thelifeyoucansave.org, I have a giving table that is a bit like a tax table. The rate at which I suggest you give, the percentage of your income that you give, rises as your income rises. So you might be earning $40,000 a year in the United States, let’s say. That’s not a lot, but you may still find that you have more than you really need for your basic needs; that will depend on what other responsibilities and obligations you have, obviously. And I think it’s good for people to develop a practice of giving, even if it’s only a very small amount at that point. And hopefully they’ll feel good about it; will add some meaning to their lives. They will be aware that there are others who are worse-off than they are, and that might, you know, also give a more positive tone to the way they look at life. In addition to that, they’ll be developing a good habit, should, and I hope this happens to all of you, should you then start to earn more money and become more prosperous and be able to give more. So I think that if you’re in a country that has those opportunities, you have a good chance of, even if things seem tough now, you have a good chance of working your way out of poverty and getting into a point where you too will have something that you can give and give effectively to help those who are worse-off than you are.

– What are the positive psychological effects of giving?

– There are several studies that psychologists have conducted to test whether people who are generous and give more are happier in life or not. And the answer is unequivocally yes. There’s a strong correlation between people who give and people who are happy. And of course if you’re a skeptic, you’re thinking you might say, “Well, which way does that run? Are they happier because they give or do they give more because they’re happy?” And it’s possible that it runs both ways, but there’s some interesting research that shows that giving does make people happier. One trial that I could cite was done like this. People were invited to volunteer for a study, came in in the morning, and they were given $20. Again, this was a few years ago. Maybe this is like being given $30 today, I don’t know. And half of them, randomly selected, were said, “Go and buy something nice for yourself.” And the other half were told, “Go and use this to do something good for somebody.” And then all of them were asked to come back and report at the end of the day on how their day had gone. And the people who had been given the money and told to do something good for somebody and reported on what they’d done that was good for somebody evaluated their day more positively than the ones who were told to spend the money on themselves, which is in some ways a surprising finding, but one that I think does reflect feelings that I’ve had that I know many people who give have that it’s an important positive in their life. The fact that you are able to give is a positive; that you’re able to make that contribution to the world and to others who are less fortunate than you is, for many people, a really rich source of happiness and one that’s much more important than the consumer treadmill, which says, “I need to have this brand of clothing, this brand of bag,” or whatever it might be.

– How has the movement grown over the years?

– Effective altruism really started in the 21st century. It didn’t exist before. Back in the 1970s, I wrote an article called “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” which was encouraging us to be altruistic and to think about people, as the title suggests, suffering from famine, but more generally people in extreme poverty, and suggested that if we were affluent, then morality required that we help people to some degree. It’s an article in which I use the story of rescuing a drowning child in a shallow pond. And I said that if you saw such a child and you were the only person there to stop the child drowning, but you didn’t do it because you were wearing expensive clothes you didn’t wanna ruin, that would be a horrible thing to do. But if you agree that that’s a horrible thing to do when the child is in front of you, then what about when the child isn’t in front of you but is in a different country, but you can still be very confident that your donation will help them and save their life too? So that article got widely reprinted in a lot of philosophy anthologies, so it got used in a lot of classrooms and a lot of undergraduate philosophy students read it. And among those philosophy students were two who ended up being graduate students together at Oxford, an Australian, Toby Ord, and someone from Scotland, William MacAskill. And somehow they, I don’t know if they were talking about my article, but they both read the article and they were interested in altruism. But one thing that I hadn’t really focused on in my article was how you do the most good with whatever you can give. And Toby Ord focused on that. He’s the one who came up with this comparison between giving to guide dogs for the blind and giving to an organization preventing blindness from trachoma, and how dramatic the difference was that you could make by giving to the more effective organization rather than the less effective one. So he thought people ought to know more about those kinds of things, and he started an organization called Giving What We Can. And William MacAskill helped with that and helped with 80,000 Hours, the career choice organization. And from very small beginnings, they built up this effective altruism movement, which is now a global movement. It has followers in many, many countries, has been responsible for moving billions of dollars into more effective causes, and I think is really, you know, growing, and has the potential to do a lot more good. It’s not only about global poverty. A lot of effective altruists are concerned about animal welfare, reducing animal suffering, and there’s been a big push into reducing the risk of extinction and looking at the long-term future. Both Toby and Will wrote books relating to that. Toby’s book is called “The Precipice,” Will’s is called “What We Owe the Future.” And they both emphasize the importance of preventing extinction and preventing risks that would lead us all to have a really bad future, but instead to try to reduce risks of extinction and also to try to make sure that we have the kind of open future in which ideas will be able to flourish, technology will grow, and altruism will grow as well, so that eventually we have both the ability and the will to make sure that nobody is in extreme poverty, nobody is suffering unnecessarily, and we are providing well not only for our own generation, but for future generations too.

– Part IV: Why controversial ideas should be discussed. Why is freedom of thought crucial for the pursuit of knowledge?

– I believe very strongly that freedom of thought and expression is a very important basic good for any society that hopes to progress, that hopes to improve the world’s situation, and hopes also to progress in knowledge and understanding of what is true. And I think progressing in knowledge and truth is an important instrument towards improving the well-being of everybody living on this planet. So why is freedom of thought and expression so important for improving that? Well, for two reasons: One is, and this all goes back, by the way, to John Stuart Mill’s famous 19th century essay on liberty. One is we can never know for sure when we’re mistaken. There’ve been such a lot of beliefs that people have been certain of and persecuted people who oppose them that we now regard as false. Obviously, there were societies that believed that the white race was entitled to rule over the Black race. There’ve been societies that believed that sexual relations between people of the same sex were an abomination. And in fact, there still are some societies that believe that, and people who do practice that should be killed. There are societies- are times that have believed a whole lot of false factual information, such as the idea that the Earth is the center of the Universe, and the Sun revolves around the Earth. And the Roman Catholic Church persecuted people for rejecting that belief. So it’s quite possible that we are all agreed on things that we believe to be true that are false. And if we prevent them being critically examined and scrutinized and prevent people putting arguments against them, then we are not going to get at the truth. We are not going to discover which of our beliefs are false and which of them are true. There’s also a second reason why it’s really important for us to allow freedom of thought and discussion. Even if there are beliefs that we hold that are true, if we prevent people challenging those beliefs, we will lose our understanding of why they’re true and how they would in fact meet objections that might be made to them. Because by preventing people making those objections, we don’t understand how the objections are refuted. So it’s much better, even if you are convinced that what you know is true and important, and even if, let’s say, it really is true, you will understand better why you believe that and how it can resist objections if you allow it to be questioned.

– What inspired the Journal of Controversial Ideas?

– I founded the Journal of Controversial Ideas together with my co-editors, Francesca Minerva and Jeff McMahan, because all three of us were troubled by the narrowing climate of ideas that could be openly and freely discussed. One of the early articles in philosophy that led to a reaction that we felt was unfortunate was when a young philosopher called Rebecca Tuvel published an article in which she accepted the idea that people who wish to be transgender should be able to identify as a gender different from that with which they were born. But she asked the question, if people can do that with gender, why can’t they do that with regard to race? And she gave us an instance of an example of somebody who had not been descended from African ancestry but was working for an organization in the United States that was helping Blacks, and herself identified as Black. And when it was exposed that she was not really Black, she lost her position and there was a lot of condemnation. And in fact, a lot of that condemnation came from people with the same politics as those who strongly supported the idea of anybody to identify as a gender different from that that they were assigned at birth. So simply for raising that question about transracialism, if you like, there was a petition to the journal, it was a journal called Hypatia that Tuvel published that article in, calling for it to be withdrawn and criticizing the editors for publishing it. And this was, as I say, a lot of it was coming from women who were supporting transgender people who were trans women or trans men, but it was directed against a young woman who was an untenured philosophy professor at that time. So we felt that the article was one that raised a good question and an appropriate response for those who disagreed would’ve been to show why they thought it was wrong, why they thought transracialism was different from transgenderism. But, you know, to attack the article and say it ought to be withdrawn seemed to us to be completely the wrong reaction. And then there’ve been a number of other instances since then where many people, some philosophers but not all philosophers, have gotten into trouble on a range of different issues, and in some cases have been suspended from their teaching and disciplined. And it seems like university administrations have been very weak in standing up to defend academic freedom. And the idea of university administrations following a Twitter storm of protest against one of their professors having said something seemed to us to be completely wrong. And our concern was that people would stop publishing controversial ideas because they wouldn’t want to be attacked in this way. So we thought it would be good to have a journal, which was an academic journal, which means that we review the papers sent to us, we get them sent in an anonymous form and have them reviewed anonymously so people are not biased in favor of, you know, people who may have reputations they know, and then publish good articles. And if the authors did not want to put their name on it, usually authors do wanna put their names on articles in academic journals, and in fact, we didn’t know of any academic journals that would allow people to publish anonymously, but we said if they didn’t want to publish under their own name, we would accept anonymous publication. And then if later on the climate changed and they wanted to be acknowledged as the author, we would be happy to do that. So that was the basic idea of the journal, and we have in fact published a number of papers anonymously, but not all the papers we publish are anonymous; maybe about a third of them are. But we’ve discovered that there’s something else important that we’re doing, and that is we’re publishing papers where the author is quite happy to have their name attached to it, but the journal editors don’t wanna publish them. The journal editors, even sometimes after they’ve been peer-reviewed and have had good reviews, the journal editors discovered that they’re too sensitive. In one case, there was an article which was about racial issues, which was very close to being accepted by a journal, it had had good peer reviews and seemed well on the way to being accepted, and then George Floyd was murdered. And with the murder of George Floyd, of course, there was a whole lot more activity protesting against the murder of Floyd and also protesting against other police killings of Blacks and in general making the treatment of Blacks much more sensitive. And the editor of this journal decided that even though the article had been well-reviewed, they would not publish it because of the more sensitive climate. That incident was a paper about when it’s legitimate to use blackface, when it’s legitimate for people who are not Black to put blackface on to act as if they are a person of African descent. And we put it through our review process, it had some interesting things to say, it had a more nuanced view on that issue than other discussions, and we thought it was worth publishing. We did publish it and the author put in a paragraph explaining why he was thankful to us for publishing it. And that’s now happened with a number of articles in the Journal of Controversial Ideas that they had been rejected by other journals not because they weren’t well argued, but because they were politically controversial.

– Are some ideas so harmful that they shouldn’t be given a platform?

– The argument is mostly put against the controversial articles that we receive that they are going to harm disadvantaged or marginalized groups. And, you know, there are a number of fields of articles that are controversial, but perhaps the one that we’ve received the most articles submitted to us about has been about transgender issues. And the argument here is that if we publish articles which emphasize the significance of biological sex, and which say, for example, that somebody is only really a woman if their biological sex changes and not if they identify as a woman, even though they are unchanged in terms of their male biology, that that is harmful to trans women who have chosen not to change their biology, that it attacks their self-identity, and self-identity is very important, and that they are very much a vulnerable group both in terms of being discriminated against and attacked by many people, but also in terms of having a higher rate of depression and suicide than other groups. So people have said that it’s therefore wrong of us to publish these articles. Now, we take all of those concerns seriously. I think it’s absolutely true that trans people are vulnerable, that they’re discriminated against, that they have a hard time of it, and that some of them will be upset if they read some of the articles in our journal. Now, of course there’s no coercion to read any articles in our journal, but possibly simply knowing that such articles are published may disturb them. But against that, we weigh the importance of having an open debate on issues and the importance of the fact that an issue doesn’t disappear if you suppress discussion about it. People will still think these things, and some people will say these things. And because there is no open discussion, there won’t be any good understanding of how best to refute the things that people have said. We stick by the view that John Stuart Mill put forward that if you want to understand a view, even if it’s true, you have to allow it to be challenged and you have to know how those challenges should be met. And we do think that, you know, there are factors on other sides. In particular, to continue with the transgender issue, there are the concerns of some women of a feminist concern, if you like, that some women want to have spaces where there are only women, and by only women they mean people without a penis and testicles and people without that male biology, which they may have more testosterone circulating in their body. And they believe that such individuals are more likely to sexually assault them. And again, that’s a claim that has some empirical basis. So it’s not as if there’s only one side to this issue. The so-called gender critical feminists who argue against the idea that merely changing your identification, I mean, the choice of identification, is enough to make someone who is biologically male count as a woman in every respect have some kind of case that we think, we’re not saying that case is necessarily right, but we think it’s better that that case be heard and that people who want to defend the idea of self-identification and the gender issue should then refute the arguments. And the Journal of Controversial Ideas, of course, is open to them to submit refutations of any articles they publish as anyone is to submit a counter argument against any of the articles we publish. We warmly welcome that kind of controversy. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

– Has your writing advanced progressive discussion on controversial ideas?

– One area in which I’ve worked for a very long time as a professor of bioethics and previously as just a professor of philosophy is the question of choice in ending life. And I’ve argued for voluntary euthanasia for people who are terminally ill and wanna die or incurably ill and wanna die. And similarly, physician-assisted dying or voluntary-assisted dying, which is similar. Now, those arguments themselves were not protested against. I never lacked freedom of expression to argue for voluntary euthanasia or physician-assisted dying. But when I extended that to the possibility of parents choosing to end the life of a severely disabled newborn infant where the prognosis was very poor for the future of the child and the parents thought it was in the best interest of the child and of their family that the child not live, I was protested against on that issue in a number of countries. I was protested against in that issue initially in Germany, which understandably has a Nazi past and was very concerned about anything that looked like what the Nazis did, and the Nazis had a so-called euthanasia program for dealing with people who were mentally ill, but it wasn’t really euthanasia. It wasn’t for the benefit of people who were suffering or so severely disabled that they could not enjoy life at all. It was rather to remove people who were seen as a blot on the Aryan folk. So obviously what I was saying was not really about that, but I did get protests in Germany. And when I came to Princeton in 1999, there were protests against my appointment at Princeton because of my views on that issue. Now, I think that discussion is a little more open now in that in some countries it is being discussed. And in fact in the Netherlands, there are protocols that medical organizations have accepted which allow doctors in a very carefully circumscribed number of cases, and there’ve been only really a handful of cases, to do that, to actively end the life of a very severely disabled newborn, especially one who was in pain, with the consent or with the wishes of the parents. In other countries, it’s not exactly that that’s happening, but on the other hand, doctors who are treating a baby who needs life support and who also has a very poor prognosis will go to the parents and ask the parents if they wish to have life support continued. And they will describe the prognosis for the child and say, “You might think it’s better for your child that we withdraw treatment. The child will then die, and we can make the child comfortable while the child dies.” And many parents given that choice exercise it. So that’s not very different from what I’ve been advocating. And I think perhaps my views have had some influence in making doctors more willing to do that, more open to discussing it with the parents, and then to removing life support and ensuring a humane death for a child whose future was going to be very bleak.

– Why should we be more comfortable with uncomfortable ideas?

– We should try to make ourselves more comfortable with controversial ideas because it’s important that those ideas be discussed. It’s important to be on the side of finding out the truth and not of protecting what we think is the truth behind some kind of shield so that it can’t be challenged. Because again, looking at past history, we know that many people have very firmly believed ideas that have turned out to be false, and they have put up shields against anybody criticizing those ideas- and those ideas hung on a lot longer because they were not able to be criticized. Let’s go back to the example of same-sex relationships. In the early 19th century, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of the Utilitarian school, wrote essays strongly attacking the idea that it should be a crime for anyone to have sex with someone of their own sex. He argued, as a utilitarian would, that this experience is enjoyable for the consenting adult parties involved and does no harm to anyone else. But Bentham never published those papers because he felt that to publish them at that time would’ve brought discredit on all of the other things that he and the early English utilitarians wanted to do. For example, prison reform. For example, ending the slave trade. For example, bringing about a universal suffrage so that instead of just wealthy property owners voting, everybody could vote. So those essays remained unpublished until this century. And, you know, that’s an example of something that people firmly believed in and did not allow a real debate. Maybe if they had been more open to controversial ideas and they’d had debates about that, then many decades of repression and discrimination against gays could have been avoided.