Do All Creatures, Great and Small, and Made From Silicon, Have Rights? (with Jeff Sebo)

Should monkeys have the same rights as humans? What about elephants, ants, or invertebrates? NYU philosopher Jeff Sebo makes the case for expanding your moral circle to many more beings than you might expect, including those based on silicon chips. Listen as Sebo and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss to whom and what we owe moral consideration, how we determine a being's intrinsic moral significance, and why we have ethical obligations to others, anyway. They also discuss human exceptionalism--the idea that humans should be prioritized over other beings.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is March 12, 2025, and my guest is author and philosopher Jeff Sebo of New York

• 0:43Speaker 00

  University. Our topic for today's conversation is his new book, The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why. Jeff, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  What is the moral circle?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  The moral circle is a metaphor for our conception of the moral community. So when we make decisions, when we select actions or policies, to whom are we accountable? To whom do we have responsibilities? Who do we extend consideration? Normally, we might extend consideration only to some humans, though many of us now recognize we really owe consideration at least to all humans and many animals, like mammals and birds, affected by our actions and policies. So this book is about, should we go farther than that? And if so, how far should we go?

• 1:34Speaker 00

  You start with a provocative, entertaining scenario that you come back to now and then, and maybe we will as well in our conversation. You've got some roommates. One's Carmen, the other is Dara, or maybe you pronounce it differently. I don't know. It's in print. Tell us about Carmen and Dara, and before we know more about them, your initial introduction to the group, and then we'll talk about how that gets more complicated once we learn about their nature.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. I should say, by the way, that this thought experiment is inspired by a similar one from the philosopher Dale Jamison, but I take it a little bit farther. So imagine that you live with a couple of roommates, Carmen and Dara. You get along really well. Obviously, you have agreements and disagreements, and you have to sort through some tensions because you live together and have different preferences. But on the whole, you have good relationships. One day, the three of you, for fun, decide to take ancestry tests to learn a little bit more about where you come from. And to your surprise, to your collective surprise, your roommate Carmen turns out not to be a member of your species

• 2:58Speaker 01

  at all. She turns out to be a Neanderthal. You thought Neanderthals were extinct, but it turns out a small population has still survived and exists to this day, and Carmen is one of their members. And your roommate Dara, it turns out, is not even a being of your kind. Dara is a Westworld-style robot. You thought that, at best, these kinds of beings would exist only in the farther future, but it turns out that a small population already exists in beta mode, and Dara is one of their, a member of their population. And so the question that I ask in this thought experiment is, how does this revelation affect

• 3:40Speaker 01

  your attitudes towards, but more importantly, your moral relationship with your roommates? Do you still feel that you have a responsibility to consider their interests and strive to find a fair and equitable way to live together in your household, in spite of the fact that Carmen is a member of a different species and Dara is a being of a different substrate? Or do you now feel that you have a right, as long as you can get away with it, to treat them however you like and impose your own beliefs and values and decisions on them, even if it seems to be against their will?

• 4:15Speaker 00

  And I like the modest, undemanding example of, you know, playing music late at night or early in the morning, if we have different wake-up and work times. You know, we could also imagine...

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Them having different kinds of ancestry than than the ones you chose. One of them could have a parent who was a guard at Auschwitz. One of them could be a founder of the Ku Klux Klan's offspring. And we could ask questions of whether that should change things. We could think, we could discover things about Carmen and Dara in their own past, not just their parents' past, that disgust us or we think is morally reprehensible. So I think it's a, it's a very interesting idea to think about how we treat people in general. And often, I think in our conversation, we might go back and forth between how we think

• 5:14Speaker 00

  we ought to treat them versus what does morality demand of us. And they may not be the same for, for, you know, a variety of reasons. But let's start with the Carmen and Dara that you talked about. Summarize what you think are some of the range of responses people could have in that, in that situation, how you think we ought to respond.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are a lot of options, even within modern ethical theory. And then, of course, in society, people are going to have an even wider range of responses. So most people, at least these days in philosophy, would accept that you do still have moral responsibilities to your roommate Carmen. Carmen is the Neanderthal. Yes, Carmen is a member of a different species, but apparently this species has co-evolved with humanity in such a way that we now have broadly the same capacities and interests and needs and vulnerabilities. And so Carmen, you can presume, is still conscious. It feels like something to be her, is sentient. She can feel pleasure and pain and happiness and suffering, is agentic.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  She can set and pursue her own goals based on her own beliefs and desires. And she still has all the same projects and relationships that she had yesterday before you had this revelation. So the mere fact in and of itself that Carmen is a member of a separate, reproductively isolated, but very close species is not enough.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  To to strip away any intrinsic moral significance she has and her interests have. And I think pretty much everybody would agree about that. There might be subtle differences now in terms of what she wants and needs and how you relate to her. But but fundamentally, you do still have responsibilities to her. Now, Dara is a whole separate question. Dara appears to be conscious and sentient and agentic and have projects and relationships. But Dara is a product of science, not of evolution. And Dara is made out of silicon-based chips, not carbon-based cells. So so in this case, you might have real uncertainty.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  And philosophers and and other experts have real uncertainty about whether a sufficiently advanced, sophisticated silicon-based being like a Westworld-style robot like your roommate Dara, whether it really can feel like anything to be that being, whether they really can experience pleasure and pain and set and pursue their own goals in a morally significant way. And and so while we might have broad consensus that you still have responsibilities to Carmen, with Dara, we might have a lot of disagreement and uncertainty. And then you are going to have to make decisions about how to treat her despite that disagreement and uncertainty.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  So before we go further in this, talk about the welfare principle and how that might inform that you write about and how that might inform how we deal with this new information.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  The welfare principle is is a plausible and widely accepted idea and philosophy that holds if you have a capacity for welfare, then you also have moral standing. So this is what that means. The capacity for welfare is understood as the capacity to be benefited and harmed, to be made better off or worse off for your own sake, right? My car could be damaged, but my car is not really capable of being harmed, made worse off for its own sake. So my car lacks the capacity for welfare. And moral standing means that you have a certain kind of intrinsic moral significance, that you matter for your own sake, and that I have moral responsibilities to you. I owe them to you.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  And the welfare principle basically holds that welfare is sufficient for moral standing. If you have the capacity for welfare, that is enough for you to matter for your own sake and for me to have responsibilities to you when making decisions that affect you.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  So just two comments, and not the first whimsical. We will link to this clip. One of my favorite moments in Faulty Towers is when Basil Falty, in a hurry to get somewhere, his car breaks down and doesn't restart at like a red light or somewhere. And he gets enraged and he goes, he gets out of the car. He goes and picks up a large branch by the side of the road and he starts hitting the car with it, saying, you know, "How many times have I told you?" And it's funny, it's very funny, but it illustrates unintentionally this principle. Car, he could damage the car, right? He could, he could dent it, he could hurt its paint, he could incapacitate it permanently

• 9:56Speaker 00

  with a set of actions, but he can't harm the car for its, in its own sense of self. Just to be clear, because we're going to turn to consciousness inevitably in this conversation, going back to Dara, if I, if I notice that Dara's batteries are running low and I boost her up, or vice versa, unplug her, or block her access to electricity, you know, similarly to keeping Carmen from eating stuff out of the fridge, taking away her keys so she can't go buy groceries, we would be comfortable saying that, that is cruel, it's harmful to Carmen. Dara would be, I think, more complicated.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  So you want to add anything in terms of the welfare principle for Dara in terms of suffering or well-being or happiness? Because in one of the formulations, I thought it might include this, but I'm not sure.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, what I can add, and by the way, I love, I love that example. And the philosopher Derek Parfit has a similar example. He used to talk about how he would always feel the strong urge to hit and punish his computer when the computer stops working and then he would have to try to psychologically overcome that. In any case, part of what is interesting and complicated about the Dara case is that it reveals disagreement and uncertainty, both about ethics and about science, both about the values and about the facts. So on the ethics side, we could have disagreement and uncertainty about what is the basis for welfare and moral standing in the first place? Do you need to be sentient, capable of consciously experiencing pleasure and pain?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Or is it enough to be conscious without being sentient, to be able to have subjective experiences, even if they lack a positive or negative valence? Or is it enough to be agentic without being conscious, to be able to set and pursue goals, even if it feels like nothing to be you? Philosophers disagree about that. And based on your answer to that question, that sets a different standard that Dara would need to meet. And then on the science side, we might also have disagreement and uncertainty about what it takes to meet those standards. Is a sufficiently sophisticated silicon-based being capable of having feelings of their own? And both of those are contested sets of issues. And that is part of what would probably make you feel really confused if you learned

• 12:21Speaker 01

  that your roommate Dara is a silicon-based robot after all.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  You used the phrase, I forget exactly how you used it, the experience of what it's like to be you, something like that. That's a reference, I assume, to Thomas Nagel. You want to take a minute and step back and give listeners and viewers a little bit of that background as an example of what one way of thinking of consciousness and sentience?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. So Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper called "What is it like to be a bat?" This was now decades ago. And basically, this paper was helping people to understand what we now call phenomenal consciousness. And this is helpful because the word consciousness can be used in many ways. Sometimes we can use it to mean being awake instead of being asleep, or being self-conscious, self-aware, instead of not having that kind of metacognition. But in this paper, Tom Nagel was focusing on a particular phenomenon, which he used "what is it like to be you" to identify. And the basic idea here is that our brains

• 13:35Speaker 01

  do a lot of processing. Some of it corresponds to subjective experiences, and some of it might not, right? So when our brains have perceptual experiences, or affective experiences, when I see the color red, when I hear the sound of a trumpet, when I feel pleasure and pain, those are all subjective experiences that feel like something to me. But then, when my brain helps my body regulate heartbeat, or digestion, that might not feel like anything at all. So the question here is, first of all, what is it like to be a radically different kind of being? What are their subjective experiences, those kinds of conscious experiences like? And then, second of all, what kinds of beings can have those experiences in the

• 14:17Speaker 01

  first place? How far does it extend in the tree of life, and then beyond the tree of life? So yeah, when we ask about consciousness in this context, we are focusing on phenomenal consciousness. What is it like to be a different kind of being?

• 14:31Speaker 00

  And this is sometimes called qualia, your perception of things. A lot of interesting papers, at least interesting to me, on this. Many listeners of yours may not find it of interest, but the Nagel paper, which we'll link to, is mostly accessible to a non-philosopher. If I remember correctly, there's some hard parts. But I want to reference another work of philosophy, which I'm going to forget the name of, but you might remember it. It's by Harry Frankfurt on...

• 15:04Speaker 00

  I think it's called, I looked it up a second ago. I think it's, it might be necessity and desire, but it might not be. But in that paper, if I'm getting it right, and we'll link to the right one, he talks about that we have desires about our desires. So, an animal might have a desire for shelter, reproduction, food, warmth, all kinds of things on a cold, rainy night. But, and we have those things too. So, in that sense, we share a certain level of consciousness with, with animals. But we also have desires about our desires. So, I might desire ice cream, but I might desire that I didn't like it as much as I do. And this opens, I think, a deep, it sounds kind of trivial, but it's actually, I think,

• 15:46Speaker 00

  quite important. It opens a, a way that I think about this question of, of AI, of, of robots and Westworld characters. Can you, do you imagine the possibility that Dara will have regrets? That Dara will wish her hair were a different color, or wish she had, had chosen, been assigned to someone other than me, or you, as her roommate, or wishes she hadn't been cruel to Carmen unintentionally, earlier that morning, in an interaction over

• 16:26Speaker 00

  the, the volume level of the stereo. And for me, since it's going to be really hard, well, you write a lot about the fact that it's hard to know what level of consciousness anything feels, from what level of, of suffering and happiness anything feels, whether it's an ant, up to a, a, a dog, say, for example. And we already have the experience of Claude and other LLMs that...

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Act in language the way humans do, and we presume humans are like us, and we feel suffering and happiness. So we assume, we might assume that Claude does. But if Claude does not have regret, if Claude doesn't have longing, if Claude, like I don't, I don't, I didn't use Claude, say, yesterday, does he sit there? Not, does he, he doesn't sit there, but does, when I come back to him, does he say, he might say, gee, I was so sorry you didn't talk to me yesterday. But did that, does that have any meaning if he's a machine? For me, it means, at the current level, it certainly has no meaning to me. You might disagree, and you might, we might disagree on the probability that Claude will

• 17:38Speaker 00

  become something different. What are your thoughts on these issues of regret, desire, longing, sadness, and so on, other than their verbal manifestations, and whether that tells us anything about LLMs and other types of silicon-based things?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot there. So one is about this concept of second-order desire, desires about other desires. Another is about these complex emotional states like regret. And then a third is about the present and future state of large language models and other AI systems, and how these ideas all fit together. So briefly, on each of these points, and then you can tell me which one you want to pursue, if any of them. With respect to second-order desire, and then these more complex states like regret, there is no reason in principle why those should be unavailable, not only for non-human animals in certain forms, but

• 18:36Speaker 01

  also, and especially for AI systems. So my dog, for example, might not have desires about desires in the same kind of linguistic way that I do.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  And he also might not experience regret in the same kind of way that I do. But he can have his own kind of metacognition and that can still carry some ethical weight. So for example, he can attend to his own perceptual experiences as well as the perceptual experiences of others. And that kind of attentiveness can allow him to tune in to some sorts of mental states and have different kinds of experiences and make different kinds of decisions. And then that can affect his interests and his goals and what I owe him in order to make sure that I treat him well and promote his welfare. So that version of metacognition and its ethical significance can be available even to my dog. And the same can be said about more complex emotional states, perhaps not regret, because

• 19:32Speaker 01

  that really is tied into our language and reason, but emotional states that are adjacent to regret. And why does this matter for ethics? Well, there are two ways it might matter for ethics. One concerns our moral agency and the other concerns our moral patienthood. So moral agency is when you have duties and responsibilities to others. And moral patienthood is when others have duties and responsibilities to you. So I do think that having sophisticated forms of higher order states like belief and desire and emotions like regret are necessary for moral agency, for having duties and responsibilities to others. This is part of why my dog does not really have duties and responsibilities to me in the same kind of way that I do to him.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  But those complex types of higher order states and emotions are not, in my view, requirements for moral patienthood. You can still have a life that matters to you. You can still be capable of being benefited and harmed, even if you lack the cognitive sophistication that ordinary adult humans have. So those are a few general remarks about, I think, the ethical significance of those states.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  And I don't, I don't, um, I totally agree with you on, on animals. We might disagree on where the...

• 20:48Speaker 00

  There might be a line I draw, I don't think you would draw, we'll talk about it perhaps, for animals, for non-human life form, carbon life forms. But, you know, I see, I get in my Twitter feed, videos about people tricking their dogs. You know, putting, putting things, you know, putting your hand over something and the dog makes a choice, and the dog is misled by the person, and the dog is troubled. You don't, you don't know, literally, the dog is troubled, because the dog can't literally communicate, but the facial expressions, the behavior, the posture of the dog suggests disappointment, sometimes resentment. And of course, it could just be a passing state that looks like that, and it makes,

• 21:30Speaker 00

  therefore, it gets, the video gets popular on Twitter, but I'm open to that reality. I think it's much harder with, with Dara, so I want to push you there, and then we'll talk about probabilities, but start with the strong case for why I should, I could imagine caring, having to care about Dara's welfare.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Great, yeah, I think that is the tough question. So, as a starting point, there is no reason in principle why AI systems in the near future will be incapable of many of the types of cognitive states that humans and other animals can have, so we already are creating AI systems, not only with physical bodies in some cases, but also with capacities for perception, attention, learning, memory, self-awareness, social awareness, language, reason, flexible decision-making, a kind of global workspace that coordinates activity across these modules.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  So in terms of their functional behavioral capacities, as well as the underlying cognitive mechanisms that lead to those functional and behavioral capacities, we can expect that we will, within the next two, four, six, eight years, have AI systems with advanced and integrated versions of all of those capacities, and that can extend to... Cognitive capacities that play the functional role of desires about desires, of emotions like regret. So I think the only question is, will these types of cognitive capacities in AI systems come along with subjective experiences? Will it feel like something for AI systems to have desires about their own desires,

• 23:22Speaker 01

  or to have the functional equivalent of regret? And does it need to feel like something in order for AI systems with those cognitive capacities to have intrinsic moral significance and deserve respect and compassion? So what I think about that right now is, we can expect that there will in fact be AI systems with advanced and integrated versions of these cognitive capacities, functionally and behaviorally speaking.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  And we are not right now in a position to rule out a realistic possibility that it will feel like something to them. Right now, there is enough that is unknown about the nature of consciousness, about phenomenal consciousness, that it would be premature to have a very high degree of confidence that it will feel like something to be those AI systems, or that it will not feel like anything to be those AI systems. I think right now, we can presume that such systems will exist, and we should be fairly uncertain whether and at what point it will feel like anything to be them. And that is our predicament when we need to make decisions right now about whether and how to scale up this technology.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  So the only thing I disagree with the first part of your remarks about that is the self-awareness. I don't, I don't know if we have any, I'm totally agnostic. Well, that's not, that's not true. I'm skeptical. I understand, I wouldn't say it's a zero chance, but, and which is fun, because we'll talk about the role probability plays in this. But I'm skeptical that they'll develop self-awareness. I might be surprised and turn out to be wrong. It's interesting, I think, to think about how I might come to revise that view. Right? So if my only interface, you know, you could put Claude into a physical body, a thing that looks like a human, and Claude could easily express regret.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Right now Claude, I talked to Claude in two places. I talked to him on my phone. He's not inside my phone. He's an app. And similarly, on my laptop, on a webpage, on a browser. But if he was embodied in some dimension, in a physical thing called a robot, I'd be more likely to be fooled by Claude's claims of self-awareness. But I don't know how I would ever assess whether those professions of self-awareness were real. So I want to challenge you with that and see what you think. But again, and I also want to bring us back to this question of suffering and pleasure. So it might be sentient, it might be conscious.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  The question, I think the crucial question for our moral responsibilities is the one you identify, which is the welfare principle. Are you, is it enough that Claude has the kind of responses you talked about? Or is that enough to invoke the welfare principle for you?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are, those are great questions. And by the way, I agree with you about Claude. I think that if we placed Claude in a physical body capable of navigating an environment, we might start to experience Claude as having not only self-awareness, but also morally significant interests of various kinds. And that might be a false positive. We might be anthropomorphizing Claude.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  I have that already. It's embarrassing, but I can taste it. I can't quite.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  We all have it. We all have it. Yeah. And people had it two years ago. People had it four years ago with even much, much more basic large language models. So I agree with you that that could be a false positive. That could be over-attribution of these capacities. It is worth noting, however, that even near-future AI systems might not work in the same kinds of ways that current large language models do. Current large language models do generate realistic text, realistic language outputs based on text prediction and pattern matching. And so when they say, "I am self-conscious," or "I am conscious," or "I am morally significant," then we should not treat that as strong evidence that they are and that they in fact do have self-knowledge. But...

• 27:33Speaker 01

  It might be that in the near future, AI systems not only produce realistic behaviors, but produce them via the same types of cognitive mechanisms that humans and other animals use to produce similar behaviors. So representations that function like beliefs do, like desires do, like memories do, like anticipations do, fitting together in the same kind of way. And then when those AI systems profess having a certain kind of self-awareness, then we might need to take that a little bit more seriously. Now, it is worth also noting that self-awareness, as with animals, can come in different shapes and sizes, different kinds and degrees. So it might not be helpful to ask, do they have self-awareness, yes or no?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  It might be helpful to ask, what kinds of metacognition do they have and lack? And what are the moral significance of those forms of metacognition? But one area where AI systems are going to outstrip animals is that they will, at least functionally, behaviorally, have human-like versions of all of these cognitive capacities and then some. So then that goes back to your question, is that enough for moral significance? My own personal answer is no. I really think phenomenal consciousness is a key ingredient for moral standing, intrinsic moral value. And so for me, a lot really does rest on that further question. Fine, they have language, they have reason, they have self-awareness.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  We can stipulate that for the sake of discussion. Does it correspond to subjective experience? Does it feel like anything to be them? Can they feel happiness and suffering? For me intuitively, that is what everything rests on.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  And my, you know, my-

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Do I feel? Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, go ahead.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  My, you know, my reaction to that is a very common sense, but I'm not a trained philosopher, which sometimes is an advantage. Most of the time will be a disadvantage, I concede. But, you know, my, my first thought in this setting is it's a machine. Now, the fascinating part about that common sense reaction is, of course, is that maybe I'm a machine. I happen to be made out of flesh and blood, but I am at the mercy of algorithms, I'm at the mercy of my genes, I'm at the mercy of- Physical manifestations of my nervous system, my endocrine system, that maybe are analogous to what is going on inside a Westworld-type robot.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  I don't think so, but I'm, maybe I'm wrong. Because when you said, "Oh, it'll have the same cognitive," I forget how you worded it. I'm thinking, "No, it won't. It'll be vaguely analogous in that there's electric stuff in my brain as neurons fire, and there's electric stuff in Claude's responses in 01 settings." And I'm also kind of maybe finishing sentences as I go along. I just don't realize it. I'm looking for the next word, just like Claude does, et cetera, et cetera. But they're not the same. I would say, I would argue that's an illusion. Do you want to agree or push back on that before we get, I want to come back to the welfare principle?

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Great, yeah. I guess I would both agree and push back on that. So in terms of pushing back, I do think that there will be at least broadly analogous cognitive capacities in AI systems in the near future at the level of cognitive representations that play the same functional role as beliefs and desires and memories and anticipations, and so on and so forth. Now, as you say, that might not mean that there is an exact one-to-one correspondence between how it works in our brains and how it works in these silicon-based systems. For example, Peter Godfrey-Smith and other really smart philosophers and scientists point out,

• 31:32Speaker 01

  our brains play all these roles by producing these very specific kinds of chemical and electrical signals and oscillations that at present are possible in carbon-based brains, but not in silicon-based chips, right? So that then leads to this further question. How fine-grained do these similarities and capacities need to be in order to realize the relevant kinds of welfare states and the relevant... kinds of moral significance. Does it need to work exactly like it does in human or mammalian or avian brains in order to generate the the relevant kinds of interests and and significance? Or is it enough for different kinds of brains to play broadly the same functional roles in

• 32:18Speaker 01

  different kinds of ways? I think this is a real open question that is very difficult to answer. But I will caution us about racing to one extreme or the other extreme. On the one hand, it would be a mistake to be too coarse grained. If if we specify these in too broad a way, then any animal, any plant, any fungus, microscopic organisms can trivially satisfy these requirements. And that might be too broad. But if we specify it in too fine grained a way, then we might be ruling out even the possibility of consciousness or or moral significance in reptiles, amphibians, fishes, octopuses, and that would be a mistake. We should be open to the possibility that different kinds of cognitive systems can

• 33:00Speaker 01

  realize broadly similar forms of value in different kinds of ways and not rule that out by fiat.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  So let's let's turn to the basis for the welfare principle, which you don't provide. Nobody does. It's not a it's not a personal criticism. It seems self evident that it's wrong to harm things and it's good to help things. But I I want to ask why. In particular, I don't want to this is not a this is not a gotcha show and it's not much of a gotcha. And I'm sure you've thought about these things. I I would suggest the possibility that our belief in the welfare principle, the ethical demands to be kind and not be cruel, comes from a religious perspective.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  A religious perspective that many philosophers are, of course, disagree with or uncomfortable with, either intellectually or personally. I just want to raise the possibility, I'm curious how you'd react to it, that it's a leftover. It's a leftover from a long tradition of a few thousand years in, 3,000 years in Western thought. There's parallels, of course, in Eastern thought, maybe we'll talk about those as well. It crossed my mind while I was reading your book, that there are many elements of Eastern religion, there's elements of both, in your ethical principles, meaning not yours, Jeff

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Sebo's, but the disciplines, philosophies, ethical principles. And it's, your book's a very nice survey of the different ways philosophers look at these questions. But why should I care if I don't believe in God? And I think that the so-called Judeo-Christian or Buddhist, pick your choice, or Islam, Islamic principles are about how, about say, animals or our obligations. If you don't accept those, why should I care about how I treat other people? Carmen, forget Carmen and Dara, you. I'm your roommate, but you get on my nerves, Jeff. You play the stereo late at night when I want to sleep, and I don't like the smell

• 35:15Speaker 00

  of your, your, the food you're cooking, whatever it is. Now, I may try to impose my will on you and fail, but I'm more interested in the questions that your book's about, which is, why do I have an ethical obligation other than to my own pain and pleasure? I think I do, just to be clear, I'm asking a thought question, but why?

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, great, great question. And I think we might make good roommates, because I tend to go to sleep pretty early, so I think, I think we'd get along as far as that goes. Now, this is a question in meta ethics. So meta ethics is what is the status of ethics? So when we have ethical disagreement, ethical uncertainty, what are we doing in those moments? Are we disagreeing about an objective truth? Or are we shouting our preferences at each other and, and one of us will win and the other will, will lose through sheer force of will? So philosophers not surprisingly disagree with this. I will note that even if you do have a religious perspective, that is not necessarily a solution

• 36:24Speaker 01

  to this problem. 2,000 plus years ago, Plato pointed out that even if you think that what is good is what the gods say is good, you still have to ask, okay, is it good because the gods say so? Or do the gods say so because it is good? And either way, you have further questions that you need to ask, further challenges that you need to face. So this is a problem that we all face. Now, in current secular meta ethics, there are broadly two camps, and I can briefly describe each one and then say what I think about this.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Great.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  One camp is the moral realist camp. They hold that there is an objective fact of the matter about what is good, bad, right, wrong. Torturing innocent children for fun is bad and wrong, even if we all get together and agree that this is good and, and right. It is objectively true, whether we like it or not. Anti-realists, however, think, no, values are a social construct. There, there is no objective fact of the matter about what is good, bad, right and wrong. Instead, when we ask ethical questions or when we have ethical disagreements, what we are doing is talking about what each of us most fundamentally believes in values and how we can live a life that is authentic and examined and that reflects and aligns

• 37:36Speaker 01

  with what we most fundamentally believe and value. Now, for present purposes, I can say two brief things. One is, I personally side a little bit more with the anti-realists. I think that value is a social construct and, and not an objective fact of the matter in the world. But second of all, everything that I talk about in the book and everything that we talk about in contemporary applied ethics, I think you can have those conversations in roughly the same ways, whether you side with the theists, or the moral realists, or the moral anti-realists. If, for example, you are a moral realist, then you could take all of these arguments and objections and replies in the spirit of, "I am trying to get at the objective truth." And if you are an anti-realist, then you could take all of

• 38:18Speaker 01

  these arguments and objections and replies in the spirit of, "I am trying to work with you to help both of us figure out what we most deeply believe and value, and what kinds of practices would properly reflect our most deeply held beliefs and values." And my prediction is that if we really think hard about this together, and get full information and ideal coherence, then what we will discover is that our own values commit us to a certain kind of respect and compassion for other individuals with interests. So this is not a norm imposed on us from the outside. This is a norm that we discover in ourselves through sufficient reflection.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  And I think it's more of a Kantian argument, that, you know, or I don't even know how you, you'll tell me a better way to phrase it. I think most of us imagine that we'd like to live in a world where people held the welfare principle. We would prefer it not apply to us, perhaps. But when we're thinking about our ethical obligations, it's not, you can, you don't have to believe in God to believe the world would be a better place if people weren't cruel to each other. I think the challenge is, why I should accept your moral injunctions? And I think that gets trickier.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and I think there is no shortcut to answering that question. I think you have to have a long series of conversations about science and philosophy. But I think the upshot of those conversations would be... That if you are built like me and like most other humans at least, then you do have some combination of self-interest and altruism inside of you. And we would identify the parts of you that are a little bit more self-interested and the parts of you that are a little bit more altruistic. And we would think about how to build a value system and how to live a life that properly balances and reflects your self-interest and your altruism. And I think that there would be room for consideration of other welfare subjects

• 40:22Speaker 01

  and for an aspiration to consider welfare risk for them and reduce harms imposed on them within that. And but we would have to discover that through, again, a long series of conversations, thought experiments, objections and replies. I think there is no simple, single argument that can get us directly to that that destination.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  The other thing that's hard about it for me, and I, you know, I agree with you. I think we're a mixture of good and and actually, I want to say it differently. I'm gonna say it the way you said it, self-interested and altruistic. I think most people in my experience, which is limited, obviously, very limited to a certain time and place, a few places and a few times, but limited. As I get older, I marvel in horror at the willingness of human beings to do horrible things to people.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  It's not that I'm self-interested and I prefer to keep the last piece of food for me rather than for you. It's that I enjoy you not getting it. That part of our nature is hard to understand. And it, I don't know how important it is for these kinds of conversations. Maybe it's not important.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  But, you know, the simple term for it is sadism. The fact that there is a sadistic side to human beings that that gets pleasure from the suffering of others is is deeply disturbing. And it complicates, I think, these these conversations.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yes, I think this is directly relevant because we might have a lot of responsibilities to fellow humans and then to non-humans of various kinds, but we also have clear limitations on how much altruism we can achieve and sustain individually and collectively, at least right now. We can barely get it together to take care of even a fraction of eight billion humans at any given time. And so, once we start extending consideration to quintillions of members of millions of species, then are we signing up for way more than we can realistically achieve and sustain? And this is where I think it really helps to consult the different ethical traditions. So, there are some ethical traditions like utilitarianism and Kantianism that are about

• 42:41Speaker 01

  acting according to ethical principles that push us towards more respect and compassion. But then, there are other ethical traditions like virtue theory and care theory that focus more on how we can cultivate character traits and habits that can naturally guide us towards more altruistic behaviors than we are capable of right now. And how can we build social and legal and political and economic and ecological systems and structures and institutions that can likewise incentivize and pull out better behaviors from us individually and collectively? And so, I think a question that we need to ask over time through trial and error is

• 43:23Speaker 01

  how much progress can we make, understanding the extent of both our responsibilities and our limitations, towards cultivating the kinds of character traits and then building the kinds of shared systems and structures and institutions that can help us get a little more mileage out of our altruism? And then, what will that unlock in terms of our ability to achieve and sustain higher levels of care for other beings? We may never be able to get fully there, but maybe we can get a little bit farther than we have so far if we think about it in that more holistic way.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like the enterprise, I like the realism of it. I think it's laudable. I think it misses the unintended consequences of some of those things. Maybe we'll get to that, maybe we won't. You have a chapter called "Against Human Exceptionalism." Of course...

• 44:15Speaker 00

  The biblical view, the Judeo-Christian view, I don't know enough about the Quran, but I know a little bit about Buddhism. Against-human exceptionalism is closer to a Buddhist worldview and farther from a Judeo-Christian view. In the Judeo-Christian view, human beings are created in God's image. That privileges them in a way. It does not allow them to taunt a dog in a video, especially if the dog could realize it's being taunted. That would be unacceptable, I think, in Jewish-Christian tradition. But it creates a certain hierarchy, which your book rejects, and I assume most philosophers reject.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  And then it's a question, again, of how far you go down. The question of whether your concern for animals makes it harder to be concerned about human beings, or it may go the opposite, or it may make you more likely to be kind to human beings. In certain calculias, it doesn't matter. In others, it would be, since humans are privileged and exceptional, it should matter. What do you think about that?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I can, first of all, note that my arguments and conclusions and recommendations in the book are compatible with a kind of egalitarian view about the moral circle or a hierarchical view about the moral circle. For example, if you think that elephants can experience much more intense pleasures and pains than ants, then you might have reason to prioritize elephants over ants to that extent. And that would be compatible with equal consideration of equal interests and a rejection of pure species difference as a good reason to prioritize some beings over others. But now, with that said, I do think that we can improve our treatment of non-human animals, even AI systems, in a way that is good for humans.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  There are a lot of co-beneficial solutions that we might find, as long as we at least consider every stakeholder, everyone who might matter in the conversation. For example, we could pursue... Food system reforms that are better for humans and animals and the environment at the same time, we could pursue infrastructure reforms that are better for humans and wild animals and the environment at the same time. We can pursue ways of developing AI systems and approaching AI safety that are more collaborative and less adversarial with AI systems who will soon be about as powerful as us. Also, it is worth noting that a lot of forms of human prejudice and discrimination and oppression are rooted in comparisons with

• 46:57Speaker 01

  non-human animals who are presumed to be lesser than. And so advocating for non-human animals can also undercut these kinds of dehumanizing narratives that are also used to oppress marginalized human populations of various kinds. So there are all kinds of co-beneficial ways to improve human lives and societies while still improving our treatment of non-human animals. And I would love to see how much mileage we can get by pursuing co-beneficial solutions that are good for us and non-humans and the environment, and/or making modest, easily sustainable sacrifices in order to get big gains for vulnerable non-human populations. And I expect that we can get a lot of mileage out of just

• 47:40Speaker 01

  that before we have to contemplate making more significant sacrifices as a species for non-humans of various kinds.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Would you be willing, what do you think of the morality of raising birds or mammals for food if they were treated not the way the current food industry treats them, which is mostly not so nice? So let's say we imagined a free-range

• 48:19Speaker 00

  Ethical herd of cattle and free-range chickens. Chickens are trickier because I don't think chickens do so well in a free-range situation. My understanding is that they're nervous creatures and they get eaten by coyotes a lot in the free-range world, which is incredibly stressful. So, let's put that to the side. There's a bunch of animals we're going to bring into the world. They're going to have a very pleasant life by their standards. They will not break LeBron James' career scoring record ever, so they won't have that kind of thrill or become the Beatles. But within the world of their sentience and consciousness, which we don't fully understand, it will be a comfortable life.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  We will actually reduce the harm that's caused to them. We won't reproduce exactly life in the wild because nature is red in tooth and claw. So, they have a pretty good life and then they're killed painlessly for food. Do you view that as an increase in well-being in the universe?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question. I guess I have two types of answer. I can briefly mention each. First, as far as my own personal view is concerned, I do imagine that a version of that practice could add to the overall positive well-being in the world. However, my own personal view is that is not enough to make the practice ethically acceptable. Because first of all, it might still introduce less positive well-being in the world than alternative ways of creating and then treating animals could do. And second of all, I think that we have a responsibility when we knowingly, willingly, foreseeably create someone who is vulnerable and dependent on us to not only ensure that

• 50:07Speaker 01

  they have more happiness than suffering in their life, but also ensure that they have a reasonable opportunity to flourish as the kind of being that they are. And if we are bringing vulnerable animals into existence solely to kill them at six months old in order to harvest them for flesh that we can sell or that we can eat... Then that is not really consistent with giving them a reasonable opportunity to flourish in life. Now, with that said, the second answer is that I think that this is all a little bit of a distraction from where we should be focusing when it comes to conversations about food, because the reality is that this type of food production constitutes at best 5%

• 50:47Speaker 01

  to 10% of global meat production, and it would not be scalable as an alternative to factory farming and industrial animal agriculture.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Not with a billion people.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  It would take more land. Yeah, yeah, it would take more land than the planet contains to raise an army of farmed animals and treat them that way and give them that amount of space. And so what I would love is if we could all, those who reject free-range animal agriculture, those who accept free-range animal agriculture, if we could all work together over the next 25 to 50 years to end factory farming and industrial animal agriculture, which harms animals, harms public health, harms the environment, and then we can fight along the way about whether to sustain some amount of free-range animal farming as like a marginal 5% to 10% part of a future food system that would be primarily plant-based.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  I think that that would be the right approach to take, as opposed to fighting about that now in a way that prevents us from building the coalitions we need to really go after what is the main problem here for animals and public health and the environment.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  Let's go back to this, something I mentioned earlier that I think is very provocative in the book, which is the role of uncertainty and probability. So, I don't know how to ask you a question to get you started, but I bet you could do it for me, which is, is something like, when you're not sure, when there's uncertainty, which there almost is, and almost always is in many of these cases, either about the consciousness or the suffering or the happiness, how should you build that into your way of looking at the world?

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is really important because in general, in ethics and policy, we understand that we have a responsibility to consider non-negligible risks when making high stakes decisions, right? We do this all the time. People will consider even a quite low chance that a medicine will have a fatal side effect before they take the medicine. We do this in public health when thinking about risks for new pandemics and the environment when thinking about risks involving climate change and so on and so forth. But until recently, we have not really done this when asking questions about the moral circle and to whom we owe moral consideration. The question has been, are they conscious? Are they sentient? Are they agentic? Do they deserve moral consideration? And I will extend the

• 53:11Speaker 01

  moral consideration when you have proven to me that they meet those standards. And part of what I argue in the book, and Jonathan Birch and others have been making similar arguments recently, is that we should take the same precautionary approach to thinking about the scope of the moral circle that we take to any other high stakes policy domain that involves disagreement and uncertainty. So the question should not be, do they definitely matter for their own sake? And should not even be, do they probably matter for their own sake? It should instead be, is there a realistic, non-negligible, non-trivial chance that they matter for their own sake, based on the best information and arguments currently available? And if there is, I think, we should give them at least a little bit

• 53:56Speaker 01

  of moral consideration when making decisions that affects them in the spirit of caution and humility, as we investigate the matter further and try to collect more evidence and improve our understanding of the issue.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  And that leads to, you call it the risk principle, but it's sort of an ethical precautionary principle. It seems to me, to some extent, cuts both ways. And I'll word this in a

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Meaning if we're gonna act on low probability events because they might be real, and of course, probability in this sense is tricky. It's not, you know, the different senses of probability. In reality, your AI robot is either conscious or not. So you can talk about it having a one one thousandth or one one millionth chance of consciousness, but it's really, that's for me to deal with behind, in a world where I don't have any, where I don't have full information. But, sorry, what worries me

• 55:02Speaker 00

  about it is the idea that in my zeal to be open to the possibility that I need to take this group into account, I will fail to discharge my responsibilities elsewhere. I will take actions that are actually harmful to, say, people. But if there is consciousness in this, fill in the blank, or sufficient consciousness, if it's a machine, I might do some things that actually harm people. And you didn't, I think you have a paragraph on that, actually, to be fair. I think you do note that possibility. But that's what I worry about more.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do discuss that possibility somewhat in the book. And I agree with you that this is a really important issue, because there are risks involved with false positives and with false negatives, with over attribution of moral significance and with under attribution. So with over attribution, as you say, if we end up mistakenly treating objects as though we were subjects, then we might not only form inappropriate social and emotional bonds with objects, but we might also divert scarce resources away from humans and mammals and birds who really need them, towards entities that in fact have no interests or needs at all. And that would be really tragic, right? Now, the harm of false negatives, of under attribution... Of moral significance are also, of course, very important.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  That can lead to exploitation and extermination and suffering and death, often at huge scales, often for trivial reasons. It can lead to industries like factory farming, for example. And so one question is, are these risks symmetrical? Or is one much worse than the other? If if one is much worse than the other, then that might give you a little reason to err in that direction. But but even if you think these risks are symmetrical, then I still think we should extend at least some consideration to beings who have a realistic chance of mattering. But we have tools that we can use to to balance these risks. So, for example, you could have a threshold, a cutoff line for the probabilities. You might say, I will extend at least some consideration to every being with a one in

• 57:15Speaker 01

  a thousand or higher chance of mattering, but not beings with only a one in a million or billion or trillion chance of mattering. Another tool is a kind of expected value principle. You could multiply the probability that a being matters based on the evidence available to you by how much they would matter if they did. And you could treat the product of that equation as how much they matter for purposes of decision making. And that would allow you to assign a kind of discount rate across species and across substrates that would let you sort of balance the risk of false positives with the risk of false negatives and and give at least some weight to to both of those concerns.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't, that doesn't, that doesn't persuade persuade me very effectively. And mainly because those probabilities are quite subjective. They're they're not empirical. They're, I don't even know how to describe them. They're, well, there's a name for them. I don't know what they are, but they're subjective. They're not objective. But let's, let me try something else. Is it moral to have children?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, one brief response and then I will answer your question.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Didn't mean to sandbag you there out of the blue. Take a deep breath. That was a very abrupt change of focus. I apologize for that.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  I am down for abrupt changes of focus. I just wanted to also briefly address your reason for not being persuaded, because I sympathize with it, to be clear. I agree that these are subjective, imprecise, unreliable probability estimates. And they could lead us astray, and we should be very careful about making them and basing big decisions on them, especially at this stage. So the reason I push in this direction anyway is because we have to compare this decision procedure to the alternatives. And right now, the alternatives involve either totally neglecting this issue altogether, or going with our intuitions alone.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  And our intuitions are, of course, very biased, very ignorant, equally if not much more subject to all kinds of distortions. And so these kinds of probability estimates are imprecise, are unreliable. But I think, especially if we can improve them and improve the frameworks that we use for generating them, they might still be, you know, kind of like democracy, like really bad, but maybe less bad than all of the alternatives. So anyway, with respect to having kids, I am not an antinatalist. Antinatalists hold that it is unethical to have children because you introduce suffering into the world, you subject them to suffering.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  I do think that we should think about creation ethics very carefully, because we do make a lot of decisions that either directly or indirectly determine who can exist and what kinds of lives they can have if they do. And that extends not only to the very personal decision whether to have children and how to raise them, but also to these more collective political decisions about, for example, whether to pave a forest, or whether to reintroduce a forest to what was previously paved territory. That will indirectly determine the, you know, abundance and diversity of non-human life that might exist in that space, and introduce all kinds of non-human suffering and happiness into that space.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  And I think that we have neglected those sorts of creation ethics decisions and focused much more on the more direct ones, like whether to have a kid or whether to breed animals. So I have no universal answer to that question. I think if you want to have a kid, great, have a kid. If you want to reintroduce other kinds of life into the world, then that is in principle perfectly fine to do, but it gives you a responsibility to ensure that they can have a good life and that they can flourish as the kind of being that they are. We all recognize that we have that responsibility when we have a kid. Very few of us recognize that we have that responsibility when we make decisions that cause other types of beings to come into existence. And that is where I think

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  we should be focusing much more.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  But I think that the reason I brought up the kid wasn't because children are going to have some suffering in their life as children and adults, but rather thinking about, you know, your kid will probably, there's some chance, not zero, maybe more than one in a thousand, your kid would be a carnivore, even if you raise them to be a, say, vegan. And as a result, and if you start to worry about plant's consciousness, which you could and some people do, because they strive and they have, they're somewhat agentic, they turn toward the sun and so on. You can't count that out. You can't rule that out that

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  your kid will be a carnivore. And by bringing the child to the world, you are going to cause suffering in the animal world almost 100%. And thinking about the forest idea of paving it over or returning it to its natural state, you know, most people worry about that from a very human exceptionalist framework, meaning, is this good for people? Obviously, it could include values of human beings that are complicated, a desire to have nature, right? It doesn't imply we should pave over the world. It doesn't imply we should, everything should be manufacturing, which would be horrific, obviously, for all kinds of reasons.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  So the human exceptional perspective is that we are of nature, we value nature in primal ways we don't fully understand. The Lake Isle of Innisfree by Yates captures this beautifully. We have a connection to the natural world that is precious, but it's a human perspective, that preciousness and, and the creation of, say, a national park that in doing it kills bugs, for example, which you talk about, or ants, insects, more explicitly. Most people would just say, eh, that's not a big deal. And by suggesting it should be a big deal, which is an interesting perspective, I think you make it harder to improve human well-being,

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  but maybe you disagree.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, first of all, am not too concerned with the ethical significance of, of having a kid in the grand scheme of things. I, I agree with you that having a kid introduces more harm into the world. It also potentially introduces more good into the world, not only because your kid themselves might go on to experience a lot of happiness and flourishing in life, but also because if you raise them well, then they could do good works in the world and make the world a better place.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  Could be a philosopher.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Could become a philosopher. Now, as you say, when, when you make the decision to have a kid, you are signing up for teaching them a certain way, attempting to instill a certain set of beliefs and values and practices, but then ultimately knowing that they will be their own person and perhaps make different decisions than the ones you hoped they might make, and you have to be at peace with that. So it is a little bit of a gamble, both in terms of their own happiness and in terms of whether they are a net negative or net positive force in the world, and you have to be willing to take that gamble. But, but in general, and, and this comes out towards the end of the book, while I think those types of questions and decisions do matter a great deal, I think that we have been overly focused in ethics and in advocacy

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  on individual decisions and individual behaviors and individual consumption patterns when thinking about how to make the world a better place. And we could

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Make a lot more progress, I think, if, yeah, we still continue to ask those questions. But we also broaden our focus to include, how can we change our collective practices? How can we change our norms, our social, legal, political, economic systems and incentives? So that we can have better incentives, better patterns of behavior from everybody? As opposed to focusing exclusively or primarily on our individual actions, our individual meat consumption, et cetera, et cetera. So, so that is generally how, how I think about the, the kit issue. With respect to giving a lot of weight to our impacts on animals, including invertebrates, including insects.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  I do think that it complicates our ethics and policies, because now we have many more stakeholders to consider and a much wider range of stakeholders to consider. And it forces us to confront the reality that the world is a kind of tragic place. And very little that we do is going to be universally good for everybody. There will always be tensions, there will always be trade offs, there will always be winners and losers. We can work towards a better way of capturing all of that information and making decisions in a way that incorporates all of that information. But, but that will be the case, that, that we will have to consider a lot of beings and do the best we can for as many as possible and, and just accept that, that we will never be able to do everything for everyone.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  But I think that that is compatible with still investing in our species, improving human lives and societies, in part, and to go back to your religious perspective that you were mentioning before, in part because that will empower our species to be able to be good stewards of the planet, or better stewards of the planet than we currently are for everyone else. So, so first and foremost, we ought to improve human lives and society, specifically so we can empower our successors, the next generation, to be better stewards of the planet for other animals than we are. So actually taking care of ourselves is one of the best things we can do to take care of other species moving forward. But like a parent with their kids, we gotta hope that our successors follow through

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  and do good works with, with the resources that we gave them. So there is a gamble for our species there as well.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  Well said.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  I want to try to talk for a minute about the individual versus the collective thing and that you referenced.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  I think

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  a difference between philosophers, maybe, and economists.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Economists are like poor philosophers. So we're potentially dangerous.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  We are also less empirical economists. So I think it cuts both ways.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  Exactly. Well, that was my cheap shot. I wasn't going to say it that way, but thank you. I'm thinking about the fact that, you know, when I think about why the world is a place of pain for many people. There's two dimensions of it. One is the genetic endowment we bring into the world as human beings. We're not necessarily made for this world in an easy way, and we suffer. We also have glorious happiness, love. I mean, it's a very mixed and complicated bag. I really hate the antinatalist view that says it's wrong to bring children to work because they suffer. I find that repugnant.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  But I think the issue, so there's one form of human suffering is that it's just hard to be a human, okay?

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  But has many good sides, and I'm glad I'm here. The second part of it is the things we do to each other that I referred to earlier. We do terrible things to each other, both in private and in public. We do things in the dark of night, and we do things in broad daylight that are tyrannical, oppressive, cruel. And as I suggested, and it's hard to say, but I think it's true. It's not just because people want to get their own way. They actually enjoy it. They enjoy the exercise of power. They enjoy the exercise of cruelty.

• 1:09:44Speaker 00

  So when I think about your intellectual agenda, and again, I don't mean yours personally, but I think you're in this group, and I think about mine, they're very different. And one of the differences is when I look at what's wrong with the world, I don't see it as a lack of will. I see it as a complicated, really depressing set of incentives that's very hard to untangle. So the reason that we have failed to say, "Take care of the 8 billion people on the planet," isn't because we're mean, or not nice, or selfish. It's because the complexity of the system is very hard to untangle and to push it in a positive

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  direction. And as we start to try to do that, I guess maybe this makes me something of a traditional conservative, in the sense of the Chesterton over, uh, Overton, the Chesterton fence idea, that there are many things in the world that are troubling or puzzling, but it's not obvious how to make it better. And so my interventionist impulses are inevitably tempered by that, and I tend to focus on trying to be nicer to my wife, rather than trying to save the world from global warming, partly because I'm open

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  to the possibility, to take a cheap shot, Jeff, that global warming will actually increase the health and population of certain species. But I'm agnostic on that, and my first impulse would be, I don't need it to change. I don't want to engineer it, for sure. But since it's so hard to get, say, global commitment to that goal, and since the normal ways to do that scare the heck out of me, meaning some kind of global governance that would have a lack of accountability, I tend to push toward being nicer to my wife, and my kids, and my coworkers, and my podcast guests. So, you know, I don't, I try not to get too,

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  too worked up. But why don't you close this out and give us your perspective, because I think you disagree.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  I actually agree with you about almost everything that you said with maybe one exception. And by the way, in my previous book, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves, I do discuss the possibility that climate change will introduce more insects and parasites to the world, possibly less diverse animals, but more numerous animals. And so I consider the possibility that it might, at least in the short to medium term, be a net benefit for welfare for that reason, though there are many uncertainties and there are longer term destabilization concerns. In any case, happy to discuss that more sometime if you like. I completely agree with you, and this is a big part of why I try to shift focus away

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  from individual behavior within existing structures to the structures themselves and the incentives they create for collective patterns of behavior, and why I argue for a theory of change that, as I put it earlier, takes seriously our responsibilities and our limitations in equal measure. I think we do have strong responsibilities to the non-human world, and we should set a goal of making the world a friendlier place to all vulnerable stakeholders, and we have significant limitations right now: limitations to our knowledge, limitations to our power, limitations to our political will, in part because of these shared structures that are perhaps changeable.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  And I agree with you, there is the conservative Chesterton fence concern: we would be mistaken to blunder into major transformative changes without appreciating why we have the systems we have in the first place, and that could easily do a lot more harm than good. So the kind of theory of change that I advocate for and that I argue for in the book involves marrying together really ambitious goals for inclusion and egalitarianism in the future with very modest incrementalist, co-beneficial, short-term policies that can do at least a little bit more good for non-humans in the short term, while also helping us

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  get a little more knowledge, just a little bit more capacity, just a little bit more political will. So for example, with food system reform, we can pursue incrementalist Informational and financial and regulatory and just transition policies to make plant-based foods a little bit more accessible, a little bit more affordable, that would be a little better for humans and farmed animals and the environment. With infrastructure reform, we can focus on interventions like adding bird-safe glass to more energy-efficient buildings, adding wildlife corridors to new green transportation systems. And that then helps us learn whether those are good. It helps us build institutional capacity for considering wild animals. It helps us build political will by normalizing the idea of considering them as stakeholders.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  And so my idea is we can pursue these low-hanging fruit, co-beneficial, incremental interventions and learn as we go. And then that way, we can discover over time, each step of the way, where we should go next and how far we can ultimately go, rather than setting this bold agenda now with such limited information and then kind of fanatically pursuing that, even though we are probably getting in over our heads. So this is a theory of change that really tries to honor both how bold I think we should be, but then also, as you say, how incapable we are of making big changes all at once.

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Jeff Sebo. His book is The Moral Circle. Jeff, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks so much. It was a great conversation.

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to econTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.