Veganism, Atheism and Morality | Cosmic Skeptic | Modern Wisdom Podcast 103

Alex O'Connor aka Cosmic Skeptic is a YouTuber and Student at Oxford University. How many people go vegan due to a philosophical debate? And how many actively try to get the fans of their YouTube Channel to talk them out of it? Alex is one person on that list. Expect to learn the one philosophical question which Alex has trouble justifying, Alex's reasons for going vegan, whether he thinks that a less religious society has problems with morality and how religions relate to social cohesion. Extra Stuff: Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/CosmicSkeptic Subscribe to Alex on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/cosmicskeptic A Meat Eater's Case For Veganism - https://youtu.be/C1vW9iSpLLk Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex O'Connor?

  If I say like, what is it about an animal, a non-human animal, that allows you to kill them and torture them in fact, and put them through factory farm processes? Like, what is the, what is the thing that they have or the thing that they lack? That if a human were to have or to lack, you'd be okay with doing it to the human as well? Like, what is it? Is it intelligence? If it's intelligence, then can we throw people with, under a certain IQ into factory farms? Like, probably not. Or maybe it's, maybe it's self-awareness. It's like, well, is a dog self-aware? Probably, but well, a pig is just as self-aware as the dog is. So why aren't you the? It's, it's just about consistency, right? If someone turns around and says, actually, yeah, I do think it'd be a good idea to throw people with an IQ under a certain amount into factory farms, then I'd be like, well, at least you're being consistent.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  I am joined by Alex O'Connor, otherwise known as Cosmic Skeptic. Alex, welcome to the show.

• 0:51Alex O'Connor?

  Thank you for having me.

• 0:52Chris Williamson?

  It's a pleasure to have you on. We'll have a lot of your fans tuning in, I'm sure, as well. Been a lot of changes recently. We've been talking about booking this appointment in with yourself for a little while. And the topics I wanted to talk about have moved as the, as the years gone on. First things first, you've recently become vegan.

• 1:11Alex O'Connor?

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:12Chris Williamson?

  Can you tell us the story behind that, please?

• 1:15Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, you say recently, it's recent in the, in the long scheme of things, but it's been maybe four, five months now, coming on half a year soon. For, for a very long time, I've been thinking about it. And when you talk about philosophy and for some reason atheism, it seems to lend itself. Your audience will always kind of say, what do you think about this? I've always found it very strange. Someone likes what you have to say on one topic and they're desperate to hear on what you have to say on Brexit or on veganism or whatever it is. And I've never quite understood that. It's like really enjoying a footballer's commentary on a game or something and say, oh yeah, but what do you think about this political issue? It's like, well, that's not what I do. I do, I do philosophy of religion, but people wanted me to talk about veganism. So I did it in the past and you find yourself kind of jumping through hoops.

• 2:00Alex O'Connor?

  And if you listen to people like Sam Harris or someone when they're asked about morality, especially because his veganism, his moral philosophy is based on suffering. Someone says, why aren't you a vegan? And he just kind of, he, he just, he answers like a politician, you know? He's like, well, we have to, you know, we have to have an honest conversation about the precepts of the suffering. And it's like, man, just, just admit that, that you, you know, you should be a vegan. So I was kind of in, in that spot and. I was talking to friends and essentially saying, I'm pretty sure that veganism is the moral thing to do, but let me give you some arguments against it and see where we can go. And it just didn't work. And then eventually I was like, you know what, I'm going to put out a video essentially saying to people, here are the reasons for going vegan, try and talk me out of it. And the main thing that got me thinking about it was Peter Singer's

• 2:45Alex O'Connor?

  book, Animal Liberation. Peter Singer is probably the most important philosopher in my life in terms of how he's changed the way I think. I mean, there are lots of atheist philosophers who I'd be more closely associated to, because that's what I've spoken about. But they were more people who I listened to and admired, but they didn't really overhaul the way that I'm living my life. Peter Singer has done that completely with animal rights and also with his writings on philanthropy. So I read that, and I thought, man, this is big. This is a big problem. And so I made the video. No one talked me out of it. So I went vegan. It just kind of happened one day. I went cold turkey. I was on a bus into work and I saw this cat cross the road and it got scared of the bus. But because I was on the bus, it was like it was looking at me. And I saw this cat like backing away

• 3:28Alex O'Connor?

  in fear. And I just looked into its eyes and thought, what the hell am I doing? So I went and had a vegan breakfast. And then since then, I haven't had any animal products except by accident every now and again. But that's basically how it happened.

• 3:39Chris Williamson?

  We have a co-host on the show, Youssef, who is from an Islamic background, although he's not a believer anymore. And he refers to it as being stealth porked, when there's accidentally some pork products in whatever it is that he's eating. So I'm guessing that you've come up with stealth meated.

• 3:58Alex O'Connor?

  Well, you know, it's an interesting debate, actually, what you should do in situations like that. Like if you accidentally, if a chef accidentally puts some cheese on a meal. So for instance, the other day, I had some cheese on chips because I was with a friend and we, it was really late at night and we ordered some chips from a kebab place, you know. And like, we expressly just didn't say cheese. And I even said, can I have some chips with some salt and vinegar and nothing else, no sauce or anything? And he was like, yeah, sure. And they came just loaded with cheese. And we thought, what the hell do we do here? If we give that back, and it's going in the bin, there was no one else around, it was about to close. So it was like, we either eat it, or it gets thrown away. So we ate it because as far as I'm concerned, the suffering's already been wasted. It'd be a waste if it goes in the bin. It's a waste if it's used for my sensory pleasure. But at least

• 4:41Alex O'Connor?

  the pleasure's somewhat maximized in that situation as it stands. Some people, like when I spoke to a guy called Earthling Ed, a friend of mine who makes a lot of vegan content on YouTube. He, I, I asked him about this and he said, when that happens, he wouldn't, he wouldn't touch it. He, he'd rather it went to waste. He'd rather throw it in the ocean or something, just because he doesn't see it as food anymore. It's like being served plastic in your meal or something. You would just, you just wouldn't be able to eat it. Uh, but for me, because it's basically a philosophical position, like you say, like, I don't have an aversion to it. Like, I'm not gonna throw up if you, if you put a steak in front of me. Like, I, I see it the same as, I've always seen it, um, just not in the same moral light. So if it were like, here's a steak, it's gonna go

• 5:22Alex O'Connor?

  to waste if you don't eat it, um, I wouldn't have a moral problem with somebody eating it in that circumstance, where some vegans would.

• 5:29Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that your particular stance, uh, your lineage of entry into veganism is typical? I don't know of many people, at least publicly, who've taken it from the particular route that you have.

• 5:43Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know, uh, because most of the vegans that I know personally weren't vegan until I went vegan and tried to talk them into it. And then we ended up all going together. You know, the, the one, the, the biggest, the, the most, uh, popular way for people to become vegan is by having friends who are vegan. Like, that's the most, uh, common way that happens because, you know, you'll share meals with them or whatever. They'll show you how it's done. You'll realize how easy it is. Um, but I think, it kinda, it depends what type of person you are. Like, I, I spend a lot of time talking to, to people who are interested in the same things as me. They're interested in philosophy. And if you're interested in philosophy, then when you have an argument presented to you, that can be really important for you. That can really change the way you think.

• 6:24Alex O'Connor?

  But if you go to the average person on the street, they're not gonna be as affected by that as if you just showed them some footage. So I think it's probably the case that the majority of people who are vegan either were convinced by a friend, um, or they looked at the footage online and that kind of stuff. I, I think it's kind of an, an emotive response. Cause even for me, after all, like, I became convinced of the philosophical argument. And then I had that experience with the cat that finally made me, that was the day that it happened. You need that kind of emotional motivation. Like, ethics doesn't work unless it has some kind of grounding in, in your, in your emotions, in your feelings. So I think it needs both, but I would probably say that, yeah, I, it might be quite unusual, especially because like,

• 7:06Alex O'Connor?

  I don't see many vegans kind of going, I'm convinced of this, someone talked me out of it. You know, they just kind of, they have like an emotional response and they say, man, I'll never eat meat again. This is horrible, or they'll do it for the environment. I think that's actually probably the big one at the moment. The most, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the people who are going vegan now are mostly doing it for environmental purposes. Because you're beginning to see this big kind of backlash of people who are all crazy about the environment. I mean, it's the big issue at the moment. Everyone's going crazy about the environment and the oceans. And people are just saying, well, okay, so you're gonna, you're gonna stop using plastic straws to save the fish, but you won't stop eating fish to save the fish. Like, what's going on here? And people are beginning to wake up and realize that, oh, the Amazon rainforest is burning.

• 7:51Alex O'Connor?

  Okay, why is that happening? Well, it's got a lot to do with the fact that people are eating too much beef. Oh, oh, well, okay, well, let's stop using plastic. No, no, did, did you not hear me? Like, if we stop eating so much beef, then the environment, the environmental, the problem with the environment, it practically disappears if we weren't vegan tomorrow. And they're like, yeah, but there are, there are other, it's like, no, look, you either care about this or you don't. And that's why I get annoyed with people like the Extinction Rebellion group, who are, you know, blocking Parliament, blocking the roads in London and things.

• 8:22Alex O'Connor?

  I understand that direct action is needed sometimes, you know, I can get behind a bit of civil disobedience. But my God, if this is important enough for you to bring London traffic to a standstill and stop aeroplanes from taking off, then it's important enough for you to choose something else on the menu. Like, come on, I can't give anyone the time of day who knows. Some people don't know, and that's fine. But if you know how important the agricultural industry is to the rise of climate change, and you're still one of these steadfast campaigners, getting people to do everything they can, and saying, you're not allowed to travel, you know, Parliament isn't allowed to concentrate on anything else. This is the most important thing in the world, but you're still eating red meat and you're still eating fish? Then I just don't know what to say to you.

• 9:06Chris Williamson?

  People picking their morality piecemeal. I want this bit, but I don't want the other bit. I want the bit that doesn't inconvenience me and makes me look really cool to my friends, but I don't want the thing that requires me to learn some new recipes in the kitchen.

• 9:19Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly that. And, you know, I don't want people to get me wrong. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be campaigning. I'm just saying that if they're campaigning that much, then they should kind of take it to its logical conclusion. It's like if someone were...

• 9:34Alex O'Connor?

  Campaigning to to end uh end the form of slavery but but supporting another form of slavery it's like it's not a bad thing that you're campaigning to end this form of slavery but you've got to be consistent about this if you want people to take you seriously like if you want the people who are interested in the philosophy behind your movement if you want people who are interested in the arguments behind your movement to take you seriously you have to be consistent it's going to be too easy for people who are who are climate skeptics to turn around and say well if you care so much about the environment then why aren't you doing anything about your diet and you're just kind of you you'd be stumbling around and you won't really know what to say so um I think yeah you've got to you've got to be consistent to if only just to avoid the kind of criticism that you're going to receive if you don't do that.

• 10:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've got some party friends uh we run I run club nights it's been my job for the last thirteen years and in the clubbing industry there are there's an increasing woke movement which is very, very interesting and recently one of my friends posted something online talking about woke promoters there's quite a lot of them down south people that are going vegan and vegetarian but noticed the fact that they were concerned at the plight of animals and factory farming and stuff like that but were more than happy to put sixty quid into a drug dealer's hand to get some cocaine which had been made off the back of children in Brazil and in Mexico and all of the sort of drug gangs so I think you're

• 10:56Chris Williamson?

  right there's there's layers and levels to this sort of a thing so one of the things that I wanted you to present to the listeners was could you give us the arguments that most compelled you to go vegan?

• 11:09Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, well it's more I mean I I kind of look at it in the in the reverse I say that if you're going to do something that involves uh causing suffering then you have to be able to justify it and so it was more the arguments in favor of eating meat disappeared I mean if you want an argument against eating meat or uh let's say because eating meat intrinsically isn't wrong but I I kind of I use the word the phrase like eating meat to be synonymous with the the mistreatment of animals although that's probably an unfair thing to do in many ways but sometimes that's what my vocabulary does but if you want an argument against torturing animals then it's like

• 11:46Alex O'Connor?

  Most people will be content if you just say, "Well, would you be okay if I tortured a dog? I mean, how would you feel if you just saw a dog being beaten on the street? Like, what would you do?" And they'll say, "Well, that's awful." And it's like, "Well, you're already convinced then. Like, we don't actually need to get into the meta ethic of why it's wrong to make animals suffer. I just have to show you that torturing a dog is not morally different from torturing a pig." Some people might say, "Well, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Like, why should I care about the dog?" In which case, it gets a bit more difficult. You have to kind of present a meta ethical position about suffering,

• 12:18Alex O'Connor?

  which, I don't know, it gets complicated. But the main way that I get people to go vegan, philosophically speaking, is with an argument from consistency. If you're against racism and sexism, you should probably be against speciesism too. And that doesn't mean seeing people as equal. That's one of the big things that Peter Singer pointed out. He said that, like, "Look, races aren't equal. Sexes aren't equal. We have loads and loads of differences. We have different proportions. We have different languages and cultures and different, all sorts of things." Like, nobody's equal. And even in terms of skill, like, different people have different skill levels and intrinsically, they have different strengths and weaknesses. He said, you know, "If political equity, if political equal treatment was based on actual equality of people, then there would be no equality. There would be no basis for it."

• 13:03Alex O'Connor?

  He says, "It's not like... Being anti-racist isn't saying all races are equal. It's saying that despite our differences, we're all worth the same morally." And it's the same thing with animals, except you don't have to say that we're worth the same. You just have to say that we're afforded the same moral...

• 13:22Alex O'Connor?

  The same kind of... You're kind of included in the thought process, at least. Like, if you're in favor of equality of the sexes, you don't have to give men abortion rights, because that doesn't make any sense. In the same way, you can be in favor of treating animals with respect and giving them kind of an equal consideration, is the phrase that Peter Singer uses. Doesn't mean we're going to let them vote. Doesn't mean we're going to make them...

• 13:52Alex O'Connor?

  With as much as they deserve. So if I say like, what is it about an animal, a non-human animal, that allows you to kill them and torture them in fact, and put them through factory farm processes? Like, what is the, what is the thing that they have or the thing that they lack, that if a human were to have or to lack, you'd be okay with doing it to the human as well? Like, what is it? Is it intelligence? If it's intelligence, then can we throw, um, can we throw people with, under a certain IQ into factory farms? Like, probably not. Or maybe it's, maybe it's self-awareness. It's like, well, is a dog self-aware? Probably. But, well, a pig is just as self-aware as the dog is. So why aren't you, it's, it's just about consistency, right? If someone turns around and says, actually, yeah, I do think that if we, um, I do think it'd be a good idea to throw people with an IQ

• 14:37Alex O'Connor?

  under a certain amount into factory farms, then I'd be like, well, at least you're being consistent, right? The conversation shifts. Strange views, but yes, you, you being consistent. Yeah. I'm no longer saying now, here's why you should be vegan. It's, here's why you should not want to kill people who are dumb, right? Yeah, yeah. The conversation shifts. But if somebody is on the same page, which most people are, uh, it sounds absurd to compare, like racism to the treatment of animals. But if anything, like, if you quantify suffering, if what you care about is suffering, and I think most atheists at the very least do care about suffering as the basis of their morality, then animals can feel suffering just as we can. It's in different ways. Like, they might feel, they might not feel the same kind of fears and anxieties as we do. They

• 15:19Alex O'Connor?

  don't have anxiety over debt, for instance. That's a very human-specific, uh, suffering. But when it comes to physical pains and things, like, these things might be comparable, right? We can't do it in practice. But if you think pain can be quantifiable, which some people do, some people don't, then you might say, well, yeah, racism is awful. But with the state of racism at the moment in the United States, like, the amount of pain is not as much as the amount of pain in the animal industry. You might agree with that, you might not. But they are comparable at the very least. Like, they can be analogous. And if you think about the sheer numbers involved, like, this is, I mean, Peter got in a lot of trouble years ago for doing this Holocaust on Your Plate campaign, where

• 15:59Alex O'Connor?

  they made a comparison, saying like, 12 million people perished in the Holocaust between, you know, the, the years of World War II, between 39 and 45, 12 million, um, were killed. And then they just point out that This like the same number of non-human animals are tortured and killed every single hour in the United States alone for food. And people were like, how the hell could you possibly compare them? It's like, well, well, think about that for a second. Even if you think that one is way worse than the other, just think about the numbers there, like fifty billion animals being tortured and killed every year, not for war, not not for some social progress, just because people think they taste nice. Like, that's insane, right? And so if you begin to to make people see that animals can feel suffering, and you begin

• 16:42Alex O'Connor?

  to make them see how that's analogous to our own suffering, like, evolutionarily speaking, rationally speaking, I have no reason not to be a racist. I mean, I'm never gonna, I'm never gonna suffer from racism, like, in in a, in a, in a society that's dominated by white people, I mean. Um, I'm never gonna suffer, let's say, from, from anti-black racism, right? No, it's it's not gonna be a problem for me. So why, why would I be against it? It it's a rational thing, it's a moral thing, it's like, I I tap into my empathy, I tap into societal cohesion, all of these kinds of things, and I realize that suffering is bad, no matter who's suffering from it. Uh, and if I can do the same thing for them, then I can do the same thing for for non-human animals as well.

• 17:18Chris Williamson?

  It is a compelling argument. It is, it is a compelling argument. I think speciesism is definitely what most people are drawing that line at. It's an extension of us just being tribal, the same way that it would have, it would have protected us a long time ago. Um, does consciousness and suffering, are they, do they go hand in hand?

• 17:38Alex O'Connor?

  Uh, I think, it depends how you define a consciousness, like, the only thing that I care about when it comes to morality is the ability to feel pain, uh, and the ability to feel pleasure, which someone like Singer would point out, uh, is kind of predicated on, or is the basis for preference. Like, if, if a creature has such thing as preference, then they, then they have moral worth, at least some minuscule level of moral, moral worth. So if you have some creature that's somehow conscious but doesn't feel pleasure and pain, then I wouldn't consider them as part of the moral framework, uh, because if you didn't feel pleasures and pains... Like you'd essentially just be a vegetable. It's it's preferences that motivate action. You only do things because you want to do them like that. That's what motivates action. Desire motivates action.

• 18:23Alex O'Connor?

  And in order to have desire, you need to have some conception of pleasure and pain because desire is predicated upon pleasure itself. So without pleasure and pain, I don't know if consciousness can even make sense. But if it can, then that's not the important thing for me. It's just the pleasure and pain.

• 18:37Chris Williamson?

  I'm sitting down with Nia Eyal on Monday to discuss his new book, Indistractable. And in that, he cites a couple of studies that he suggests show that there isn't such a thing as pleasure chasing. There is only pain avoidance. And that was an interesting eye opener for me, just thinking about the way that we live our lives and what it is that we go towards and applies even more pressure to avoiding discomfort, avoiding suffering, as you're as you're saying here. So there must be a spectrum of suffering and of consciousness. And there must be a bottom end. There must be a line where animals no longer are animals and become vegetables.

• 19:18Chris Williamson?

  There's some animals that are more responsive to stimuli. Some plants are more responsive to stimuli than animals are, like coral or limpets. How, where do we, how do you draw the line there? Where does the rubber meet the road with that?

• 19:32Alex O'Connor?

  So it's all about the maximization of pleasure. Or I'd rather frame it actually, as your guest would, in the terms of minimization of suffering, because a lot of philosophical pessimists, so for instance, Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out in his most famous essay, he essentially said, look, all these philosophers have it totally wrong. Everyone thinks that pleasure is like the affirmative thing and pain is like the absence of pleasure or something along that lines. It's like, no, the most real thing, the most active thing is pain and all pleasure is just some kind of negation of pain. It's all about avoiding pain.

• 20:07Alex O'Connor?

  Or whether that be physical pain or like philosophical pain and then and not not being able to understand the world and absurdism. Camus said that all of the meaning of life is essentially just finding excuses not to kill yourself, like that's all that life, that's all that life is, you know. I think it makes sense to view the world in that way. And if we do, then we have to, we have to figure out the calculation that's most going to minimize suffering. A way to think about it, how you would frame the world, like where you would draw the line, whether you'd, whether you'd be okay with us killing plants and trees or whatever, is to apply Jean Rule's principle, the veil of ignorance. John, John Rule should have been a vegan because he quite famously came up with this

• 20:49Alex O'Connor?

  analogy that if you didn't know if you were going to be born black or white or lower class or upper class, whatever it was, like you didn't know what social characteristics you had, but you're about to be born into the world and you have no idea where you're going to be, where you're going to be born, let's say like in the United States, for instance. Design society before you get into that society. So design society before you know where you're going to be in it. So he concluded, you probably want to have a capitalist economy so that if you have an opportunity to make money, you can do so and you can be free to, to, to make as much money as you can, but with some kind of social safety nets that if you're born into, into areas with no economic opportunity, you'll have some help. It's like, that would be fair because you realize that that's, that's going to better your chances.

• 21:34Alex O'Connor?

  Now do, just do the same thing, but apply it to you don't know what thing you're going to be. You could be a tree, you could be a bush, you could be a chair, you could be a pig, you could be a human and design society. The question is, would you have an agricultural industry in that society? Of course you bloody wouldn't, like chickens outnumber humans three to one, you've got three times more chance of being a chicken. Are you going to be okay with those odds? Or are you going to say, no, no, let's not have KFC in this society? And I say to you, well, no, you don't understand because you could be born a human and, and you'll get so much pleasure from eating chicken. And if you are born a chicken, like chickens have so much less intelligence and, and you won't be smart, you won't, you won't, you won't feel the pain as much, like you'll be, and you'd be like, no, that's, that's insane. I'm not going to run that risk.

• 22:16Alex O'Connor?

  I would rather have the chance of being a human and have to not eat chicken than run the risk of being a chicken in, in the animal industry, right? So now the question would be, would you be okay being a tree? Or a plant, it's like, well, as far as I'm concerned, they don't feel pain, so I probably wouldn't have a problem with that. But the thing is, let's say that plants can feel pain. This is an important thing, because people often bring it up as a bit of a meme. It's like, it's like when an atheist, someone asks an atheist, like, but where do you find your meaning or something? And every atheist just rolls their eyes, like, how have you not? Like, this is just ridiculous. It's the same thing with the plants thing. People always bring it up. It's like, but plants can feel pain. And the vegans go, oh, for God's sake. And what most of them say is, they go, no, they can't feel pain. That's

• 22:57Alex O'Connor?

  ridiculous. Shut up. What I say is, okay, let's say they can feel pain. You understand that the vast majority of plants that are destroyed are not fed to humans, they're fed to livestock, right? Like, where do you think your protein gets its protein from? They're eating plants as well. If you think, if you think plants can suffer, then the best way to minimize plants being killed is to go vegan, because then we won't be feeding them to the livestock. So even if plants can feel pain, the way to minimize that pain is to go vegan. Like, veganism doesn't eliminate suffering. You're still killing animals. You're still, you're still destroying land to grow crops on and things like that. It's just about minimizing it, because that's already happening right now in order to grow crops that we then feed to cows, which we then kill and eat. Like,

• 23:42Alex O'Connor?

  just cut out the middleman and we'll reduce the suffering even, even more. So you're never going to be able to eliminate suffering. So if plants can feel pain, then that would just be a sorry fact of existence. But it would be one that we could manage by still going vegan.

• 23:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Would you say that moving forward, if you were able to create the equivalent of a philosophical zombie animal, some meat that's been grown in a chest, test tube, or whatever it might be, what would your stance be on that?

• 24:05Alex O'Connor?

  If it can't feel suffering, then no problem. I said, no suffering, no problem.

• 24:10Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that most vegans hold that view?

• 24:13Alex O'Connor?

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't know. I mean, a lot of vegans I've spoken to, most vegans I've spoken to. Who didn't go vegan at the same time as me for the same reasons, uh, give a, give a lot of weight to, uh, to preference. So I was speaking to someone in London recently. I, I do some events sometimes and it's always nice because, uh, people will come who've seen your channel. So you know, you get an opportunity to meet people and I'm, I'm very used to people coming up and saying, you know, um, I like the videos you did on atheism. I like this moral thing. Can we talk about the, the, the nature of morality or something, but I kind of forgot that I'd done the veganism thing so recently. And someone, someone comes up to me, uh, these people come up to me and say, hi, we're, we're some of your, your vegan viewers.

• 24:54Alex O'Connor?

  And I was like, wow, this is the first time this is, this is ever how I've never had this before. So I was talking to them about it and they were talking about preference. The idea being that, uh, because animals want to live, they have a preference to live, we should respect that just intrinsically. Like if you were to go and kill an animal, uh, behind its back with no suffering, would that be a problem? And I'm of the opinion that it's all about pleasure and pain. So I would say like, the preference alone isn't enough to say that you shouldn't kill that animal. And, and they had a problem with that. They were like, no, that there is some moral worth to, to preference. You're, you're getting rid of potential pleasure, that kind of thing. Um, I reject that because for instance, if you're talking about potential pleasure having worth, then you get into a whole, uh, problem with like abortion. And I'm not just talking about the normal debates about abortion.

• 25:39Alex O'Connor?

  I'm talking like the idea that you, you doing this podcast instead of going and having sex right now is preventing potential pleasure, but that's, that's just absurd.

• 25:48Chris Williamson?

  Right, Alex, that's it. We just get, we're gonna have to leave it there, mate, I'm afraid. Sorry.

• 25:51Alex O'Connor?

  Right. I mean, that, that's the excuse I always use, right?

• 25:55Alex O'Connor?

  But that's, that's an absurd argument, obviously. And, and you know, I wouldn't want anyone to take that argument seriously, but that just demonstrates why potential pleasure, at least on its own, isn't enough to justify it. So, uh, they say, for instance, well, then would you be okay with going and, and killing a human being without them feeling any suffering and without them knowing it was coming? And it's like, okay, I'm gonna need to qualify this, but yes. And the eyebrows, the back of the head, it's like, the reason that wouldn't work is because firstly, the very fact that we would be aware in our moral system that it's okay to do that would cause panic and suffering. So even just allowing that as part of the moral zeitgeist would lower suffering, which means even allowing that to be thought of as moral is immoral in itself, so we shouldn't do it.

• 26:41Alex O'Connor?

  But besides, there's so many more complications with things like friends and family, and then the effect on society and things like that, that don't apply to chickens and pigs.

• 26:49Alex O'Connor?

  Like, if you take one chicken out of a herd of a hundred and kill it without it knowing, without feeling any suffering, there's not going to be any real social implications for that. Although, there are arguments to say that the animals, that are social animals, will really notice. Like, I had this big discussion with Armin Navabi and some other YouTubers in London recently about chicken depression. There was a friend of ours who knows someone who runs a chicken farm, and he was talking about it. And I think chickens can get depressed, like, you see them when their family are killed, like, they get upset. And Armin's like, chickens can't get depressed, and we were arguing about chicken depression. And so some people would say that even if you go and kill an animal without it knowing, that's going to be a problem because its friends and family will know.

• 27:30Alex O'Connor?

  But then again, the reason that would be wrong wouldn't be because of the intrinsic removal of the preference of the animal you're killing, but because of the suffering of the other animals. Collateral damage. So it still comes down to suffering, exactly, yeah. So it's never the preference alone that I think has a moral worth, it's always the suffering. And I think that's where I would differ from any other vegans who give more, they almost take a kind of sanctity of life approach, they're like, we need to respect life, or they take a kind of, animals aren't here for our use kind of thing. It's just like a philosophical deontological principle. For me, it's like, there's no special thing about it. Like, veganism isn't a special thing in and of itself for me. It's just a derivative of my general moral principle of minimizing suffering. Like, and the same reason, I'm a vegan for the same reason that I'm not a racist.

• 28:13Alex O'Connor?

  It's like, it just kind of follows naturally, right? It's not a specific thing in its own regard. Like, being an atheist doesn't really fall in that category. Like, that's a whole different area of discussion, that's a whole different argument. But the veganism thing is just well under this umbrella of all kind of, all moral principles that I hold. The same reason that I wouldn't beat a dog on the street, the same reason that I'm against domestic violence, the same reason I'm against racism, or whatever it is, like, it's all part of the same thing. It's all just about minimizing suffering.

• 28:46Chris Williamson?

  How do animals that kill other animals fit into this paradigm? Have you thought about that?

• 28:52Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I have. And people say, you know, you don't judge the lion for dining on the dining on the gazelle. So why should I be judged for doing it? It's like, okay, well, lions also will uh will murder other lion populations and impregnate the females to to repopulate the the pride with their own children and murder the children that exist there already. Should we do that as well? Like, I I said.

• 29:15Chris Williamson?

  Hard hard pressed to roll that one forward.

• 29:17Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, you you might base your moral uh your moral framework on that of wild animals. I I think more highly of humans than than than that, you know, like in in the same way that if you had a severely disabled child who had a tumor pressing against the part of their brain that dealt with rational thought and they and they kind of smacked someone in the face, you wouldn't hold them morally responsible for it. It's but just because we don't hold that child morally responsible for doing things that we would consider wrong. We can't then turn around and do immoral things to them, right? So ju- just because we don't hold, like you could take an intensely disabled person who just was totally out of control of any of their actions. We wouldn't hold them morally responsible for trying to hit us.

• 29:59Alex O'Connor?

  But we can still hold ourselves morally responsible for trying to hit them. In the same way, we don't hold animals morally responsible for for raping each other or for killing each other or eating each other. But that doesn't mean we can do it to them as well. I mean, are we okay to have sex with animals? Some people would say, yes, that's an interest. That's another interesting discussion, actually, because like, it's like, you know, I I would I would argue that. And I don't have to take this route because I'm a vegan, but if you're okay with putting animals in factory farms, and I don't understand how you could be against people having sex with them, because then at least there's a chance they might enjoy it. And even if they don't enjoy it, it can't be much worse than being put through a factory farm. So like, that's a whole other discussion, you know what I mean? But to to to keep to the question.

• 30:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Alex O'Connor?

  The answer, uh, the answer that I would give is my moral system is based on what I consider to be rational thought processes, not trying to mirror the animal kingdom. There's no might makes right, there's no appeal to nature or anything like that. It's just about minimization of suffering.

• 30:54Chris Williamson?

  I think that difference between the animals for eating and animals for sex that you've come up with there probably strikes a chord with what most people, the reason that most people choose to go vegan. It's that much more visceral emotive response, right? Because when you think about the killing, you're somehow removed. It's not you that's doing it, you're just doing the eating. Whereas with the sex, like, you're there. Like, anyone, anyone who's watched Black Mirror, like.

• 31:20Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. It's really strange though, isn't it? It's like, people had this, people have this weird aversion. Like, if, if, if it came out in the newspaper that, um, that some farmer had been serially raping his pigs, people would be like, that's disgusting. It's like, okay, so you were okay with this person, like, torturing them, skinning them, putting a bolt through their brain, but as soon as they put their dick in it, like, oh, no, that's a step too far. Like, come on. Like, what are you doing? It's the same thing when people, um, it's like what Griswitz said in his, in his memoir. Uh, he, he was talking, Chris, Chris Hitchens wrote a memoir, uh, wrote a, wrote a book, a biography of Thomas Jefferson, who famously owned very many slaves, including Sally Hemings, who he's believed to have sexually assaulted and having a child with. And, and he pointed

• 32:04Alex O'Connor?

  out that historians are quick to kind of defend Jefferson and say, no, no, no, he didn't, he didn't sexually assault Sally Hemings. And they, and they get kind of upset by the idea that this, this hero of American history, turns out that he just sexually assaulted some woman. And Hitchens is like, oh, but they were okay with the whole owning her. Like, they were, they were okay with her, with him owning this woman as property. But at the moment, it's suggested that he tries to have sex with them, like, it suddenly becomes this horrible thing and they can't believe their hero has been stained in this way. It's like, come on, give me a break here. And I think it's kind of, that, that's analogous to, to the same thing with, with having sex with animals. It's like. If you think it's bad to have sex with a horse or a pig, then maybe you are giving pigs moral worth. Maybe you do care about their suffering. And if you do care about their suffering, then my god, stop buying McDonald's.

• 32:49Chris Williamson?

  It's people taking their moral virtues piecemeal again, isn't it? It's picking what they want from from different areas. So what do you think? What strikes me in the thing that I've thought when I watched your your first video, A Meat Eater's Case for Veganism, which will be linked in the show notes below. If you just want to see what Alex is talking about, really cool video. What struck me with that was the fact that you then decided, on the basis of quite a cerebral approach to veganism, that you would commit because you wanted to live in line, you wanted your life to live in line with your moral, your moral standing. I think that, to me, that friction in the system or that slippage in the system is probably

• 33:31Chris Williamson?

  where people don't make the jump. They think, well, okay, compelling argument, Alex, like, you know, yeah, maybe you're right, maybe you're right about that, but I just can't be asked.

• 33:42Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. Then essentially, the question is, is why be moral? And that's a difficult question to answer. That's a whole different ballgame. It's like, people will tell me, it's the one question that I can't really answer very well. It's the one kind of impenetrable, impenetrable boundary is when people say, yeah, okay, I accept that it's the moral thing to do, but I'm just an immoral person. It's like, all I can really do is tell you how to be moral. Like, or that, that sounds incredibly preachy and self-righteous. I mean, all I can tell you, what I mean by that is, all I can tell you is what I philosophically believe to be the moral thing to do, right? That's what I mean by that. I can't really tell you why you should be moral. There are philosophical arguments to do that, but all I'm saying is, if you want to be moral,

• 34:27Alex O'Connor?

  this is what I think, this is how I think it should be achieved, right? The question of why should I be moral, why should I be asked, is like, I don't know, but what if you, the way that I usually approach these people is I say, okay, let's say you are having a conversation with someone who is a racist, or a neo-Nazi, or something like that. And they said, you know what, that's a good point. Maybe, you know, maybe Jews are all right after all. Maybe the moral thing to do is to not be anti-Semitic, but I guess I'm just an immoral person. It's like, what are you, who is this? But you'd think they were insane or something. And that's the thing, like people, when you talk to people about veganism, like the conversation usually ends with them kind of going like,

• 35:08Alex O'Connor?

  yeah, wow, oh man, you make some, you make some good points, cool, yeah. Oh, but bacon though. Are you kidding me? Like, this isn't just some kind of like, interesting philosophical musing, right? This is, this is the most important moral issue of our time. It's like, is it like a nervous laughter that you're just kind of laughing it off like, oh yeah, good point, oh dear. It's like, think about this seriously, come on. Like, how would you feel if you were living in a society and you were turning around and saying, guys, how the hell are we owning people as slaves right now? This needs to end. And someone goes like, oh man, that's a good point. But cotton. But cotton though, yeah, it's like, oh man. And it's like, hold on, but you can, and it's the same thing. It's like, people turn around and go, but like,

• 35:51Alex O'Connor?

  so you don't own slaves? And you're like, yes. And they're like, but, but where do you get your cotton? It's like, what, what are you talking about? It's like, but you're vegan, so where do you get your protein?

• 36:03Alex O'Connor?

  The same, the same place that your protein gets your protein from, like,

• 36:08Alex O'Connor?

  it's just absurd. And it's like, these people have never thought about it before. And most of them haven't ever thought about it before, because it's not something that's, that's talked about in mainstream philosophy. Like, if you think about how important the moral issue actually is,

• 36:21Alex O'Connor?

  it's something that in the future will be, will be one of the biggest political issues of our time. But can you imagine, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn going at each other, talking about the nuances of the ethics of factory farming? I don't think, I don't think it's even imaginable, but, like, they would do it on almost any other issue. They'd do it on disability benefits. They'd do it on the NHS. And it's like, many of the issues that are talked about regularly in Parliament are nowhere near as important as the suffering and torture of over 50 billion sentient creatures every single year. But it just seems absurd to suggest that that would be something that would be talked about in Parliament. But that just goes to show how utterly unthinking we are when it comes to this area of ethics. It's like, it's our biggest ethical blind spot. People just...

• 37:06Alex O'Connor?

  It's not like people don't know it's there, but it's staring us in the face. And all you have to kind of do is just readjust your sight a little bit. It doesn't take much more than that. It's not like, it's not like something that people think is totally, totally okay and would fully defend. It's just, you just need to start thinking about it. That's it. And there's no way, like if you saw a book on the shelf, for instance, this is a point that was made. There's a book called Eating Animals Should We Stop? I can't remember who it's by. But he made this point, he was like in the introduction or something, he says, "I bet you assume what my conclusion is here." Like the book title just says, "Should we stop eating animals?" Right? That's all it says. But I bet you, you've already assumed that I'm going to conclude that, yeah, we should stop, haven't you?

• 37:50Alex O'Connor?

  Now, why is that? Like, it's probably because you know that anyone who's given it enough thought to write a book about it has probably become convinced that it's wrong to do. People know that if you think about it enough, then you'll become convinced that it's wrong. They're just not willing to do the thinking. And I wasn't willing to do it either, but the moment that I committed to it, like you just have to go vegan. And it's a lot easier than people think it is. It's so easy. And the more people do it, the easier it gets still.

• 38:13Chris Williamson?

  I wonder what the equivalent success ratio would be if the government employed Alex O'Connor, Cosmic Skeptic, to do the marketing campaign for pro-veganism versus the more visceral response of Peter? Like yours, it would be different sort of delivery and definitely some different imagery.

• 38:32Alex O'Connor?

  I think so. Although I wouldn't, I wouldn't really trust myself as a, as a campaign. I go toe-to-toe with a lot of vegans. I argued with Peter Singer about this. I argue with Earthling Ed about this. I argue with non-vegans like Armin Navabi about this. Essentially, so things, things that are like good in terms of progress, that are like politically good moves. So, for instance, in a lot of the colleges at Oxford, they have like meatless Mondays in the halls, right?

• 39:02Chris Williamson?

  It's a good name. But straight off the bat, it's good marketing.

• 39:04Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, well, that's, it's all supposed to be very fun and friendly and everything. And people, people, I've argued with people about this because they, they, they assume that I'm going to be all for. Like if my college were like, we're going to start doing meatless Mondays, people would think that I'd be all in favor of that. I, I can't put my name behind a campaign like that. That's why I wouldn't want, want to run a vegan campaign because technically that is reducing animal suffering. But I can't put my name behind. Giving up meat on Mondays for the same reason that as an abolitionist in the eighteen hundreds, I wouldn't want to have put my name behind a campaign that says, how about you give up your slaves on the weekend? Let them have, let them have a few days off. Like, that's not what I'm going for here. Like, I think this is wrong and needs to stop. That, that, if I want to be ethically consistent,

• 39:48Alex O'Connor?

  I have to advocate for that position. People would call that a kind of absolutism or fundamentalism. Well, maybe that's the best way to describe it, but in the same way that you're probably an absolutist or a fundamentalist when it comes to your opposition to, to human slavery, you probably wouldn't accept compromises. You, you'd say, you've got to stop doing this now. Like, full stop. There's no excuse for this. Um, so it's, it's a difficult position. That's why, that's why I wouldn't consider myself an activist and, and, and wouldn't do much activism along those kinds of, of progressive means. But I don't want to hinder people who are doing that because like I say, it is technically reducing the suffering. But I can't be the one to be in charge of that. Like, that's just, that's not.

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

  Coming at it from multiple different angles, right? Coming at it from your particular stance, which is quite cerebral, coming at it from this more emotive visceral response stance. And then this, I suppose, habitual, slow habitual move where you, well, look, you got away with Monday. You got away with, with, without meat on Monday. Look, what now, how about if we do Tuesday?

• 40:48Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, I, I consider like, I think about moral progress and you kind of, like you say, you have to have all the components. If you think about like the American Revolution, you know, you, you needed the, you needed the Jefferson to draft the document. You needed the Washington to be the emotive leader, but you also needed the Thomas Paine, who wrote the essay and said, no, no, like, forget this, forget this representation nonsense. We're gonna, we're gonna be independent. Like, at the time of the revolution, nobody really wanted independence. They, they just wanted a bit of representation in parliament and for the taxes to be, um, to be fairer. And Thomas Paine writes this essay that says, independence now. No, no exceptions. We're against tyranny, full stop. And he put out the essay and no one remembers Thomas Paine. Because he wasn't the one who actually went on and made the social progress happen because

• 41:33Alex O'Connor?

  you can't just do it like that. But you need it without that essay, without that philosophical push, then the rest of it wouldn't have happened. And I think if I'm going to play a role in the liberation of animals, and I want it to be a kind of, like you say, a kind of armchair philosophy, I want to write the essays that I want to write the essays, I want to do the arguments that are arguing for the absolutist moral position, so that the moderates and the progressives have a philosophical basis on which to base their political moves. But I couldn't take part in that side of things, really. And maybe I will in the future, maybe that will change, I don't know. But the thing that I don't think can ever really change is my conviction that this is the way forward, that this is what's not only what should happen, but what's going to happen, especially with people caring

• 42:18Alex O'Connor?

  so much about the environment right now. It's not going to take much, I think, to convince the next generation, or maybe even the generation after that, that we need to stop eating meat, at the very least, and probably all dairy products. Just once you give up meat, it's not a big step to then also give up dairy. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what role I'll play, but I'm not big on the whole compromise thing. It's not for me.

• 42:43Chris Williamson?

  I think if your philosophical framework for this, your conceptual framework, forms the foundation, there is a fair bit of weight on your shoulders. So you, all of the practice that you've had of forming these arguments and having these discussions going toe to toe with people, hopefully will stand you in good stead.

• 42:58Alex O'Connor?

  I hope so.

• 42:59Chris Williamson?

  As you move further forward. So I wanted to get on to your degree at Oxford. You're doing Philosophy and Theology, is that correct?

• 43:07Alex O'Connor?

  That's right.

• 43:08Chris Williamson?

  You've just finished your first year?

• 43:09Alex O'Connor?

  Yes.

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  What is it like studying theology as an atheist?

• 43:14Alex O'Connor?

  It's fun, you know. Interesting. So at Oxford, at the very least, and I think most theology faculties now, certainly in this country, are not theology faculties, they've rebranded themselves into theology and religion faculties. So you can tailor your approach. So you're not just studying theology, you're also studying religion as a concept. And for instance, the compulsory paper, one of the compulsory papers that all theology students have to do is the figure of Jesus through the centuries. That's a compulsory theology paper. But it's very broad.

• 43:52Alex O'Connor?

  My tutor gave us a list of certain topics that we were going to study. And I looked at the syllabus and said, hold on, we're doing this really boring, dry, mystic Russian thing in this week, but I've seen on the syllabus that you can, if you want to, do the novels of Dostoevsky, you can do Jesus in those novels. And I just said, can we do that instead? And he goes, yeah, sure, whatever. Like, that might not be the same at other universities, but because of the tutorial system at Oxford, it's very, you can very much cater it to what you want to do. So it's not like I have to sit around, like, in churchy situations and learn about the nature of God. You have to do a bit of that. Like, when we do Athanasius, who was one of the church fathers,

• 44:34Alex O'Connor?

  we have to kind of engage with the debate as to whether Jesus is fully man and fully God, or whether he's not fully man, or whether he's subordinate to the Father. But you can frame that, not as is Jesus subordinate to the Father, but did Athanasius think he was subordinate to the Father, and why not? Like, what was his biblical basis for that? You don't need to kind of actually think it's real. So you can study it from a very detached secular perspective, which means that it's not like ironic or funny that an atheist studies theology. And I think at this point, probably more atheists are studying theology than religious people. And you find that when a religious person is studying theology, at least in my experience, a lot of the time, they're very devout, and they're doing it because they want to go into the priesthood, or because they want to develop their theology, like, for their personal benefit. Whereas when

• 45:18Alex O'Connor?

  an atheist studies it, they're doing it in a more kind of academic framework. But again, that's fine, because you can do both of those things. You can tailor it. You can do the reading you want to do. You can answer the questions you want to answer. So it's actually not like, you may as well ask what it's like to be an atheist studying history. It's like, yeah, there's a lot of religion in history, but it's the same as studying it for anybody else. I think the same thing is kind of happening with theology.

• 45:43Chris Williamson?

  Does it feel very voyeuristic, in a way, the fact that you have this detachment from the belief? And obviously, you had a fairly strong existing understanding of theology going into, or at least based on your YouTube channel, it seemed like you did.

• 46:01Chris Williamson?

  Were there any significant changes? You've just completed your first year. Have you found yourself looking at your worldview significantly differently in any areas after 12 months?

• 46:12Alex O'Connor?

  Well, so far in, on the theology side of things, on philosophy, we had to do moral philosophy and general philosophy, which doesn't really touch religion, but that, like, the moral philosophy changed a lot of what I think about moral philosophy. But with reference to theology, nothing much changed, but the papers weren't really about that. Like, next year, we're doing philosophy of religion. So the thing that I talk about on my channel mostly is arguments for the existence of God and things. I don't talk so much about the nature of scripture or about the pragmatism of certain religious traditions and things. That's not really my area. I'm more about the philosophy. So if my views were going to change on the things I talk about,

• 46:50Alex O'Connor?

  it will probably happen next, next year. But you kind of, I don't know, let me think. It's, I guess, you, you realise it's much less unified than you thought. You realise that,

• 47:06Alex O'Connor?

  one of the things that really strikes me is that these people who are heralded as philosophical giants in the theological history, people like Aquinas or Augustine or whatever, or Athanasius, and you read their texts and you begin to kind of realise this is just some guy. This is just, this is just a person writing stuff. Like, they might be pretty good at writing or whatever, but like, it's just a person just writing something. Like, they're not, they're, they're easy to engage with. You can engage with them in the same way that you can engage with a modern philosopher. Like, it's not this kind of untouchable ancient wisdom. It's, it's just, it's just writing. It's just philosophical argumentation. It can be engaged with in the same way. But nothing, nothing's really changed on that front. No, I don't think so.

• 47:49Chris Williamson?

  I had a, I asked for some questions from friends and some listeners to the channel. And one of them that came up was really, really good. So I wanted to, I wanted to put this one to you as a nice way to bookend this podcast. What do you think of the claim that an increase in secularism in recent history has resulted in a decrease in moral virtue?

• 48:09Alex O'Connor?

  I don't think, I don't think that's true. I think implicit in the question might be, if that's true, then, then if the question's being asked in a kind of challenging way, it would be like, if you get rid of religion, then you get rid of moral virtue. Well, secularism isn't getting rid of religion, it's getting rid of religious influence over government, so.

• 48:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I think it's probably, probably related towards less religious following, or people increasingly becoming non-religious or a-religious, I suppose.

• 48:37Alex O'Connor?

  Well, so those are two, those are two different questions. I think that if, if by getting rid of religion, we're getting rid of kind of religious morality, then I think that's probably a good thing. Like, if you understand what religious morality often entails, then it's probably a good thing that we're getting rid of it. I don't, I don't believe, like, if you meet an atheist, I don't, and, and this isn't just me talking, I think this is probably just an intuit, just an intuition that most thinking people would have, you wouldn't assume that they're less moral. Now, you might assume that they have less of a grounding for it, if you're somebody who believes, if you're like a, an ethical subjectivist, or you don't think morality

• 49:18Alex O'Connor?

  can exist without God, you, you might think that they, they can't ground their morality. But if you speak to Christians who make the moral argument, they say, if you're an atheist, you have no basis for morality. And people always criticize them and say, and Hitchens used to do that, he'd go, how dare you say that we need moral permission to be good? How dare you say that we can't be moral without God? It's like, that's not what they're saying. They're, they're saying that you are being moral, but that you have no grounding for it, and that you're actually secretly kind of using the, the Christian worldview to, to buttress your moral views. I don't think that's true. So, when I make moral arguments.

• 49:52Alex O'Connor?

  I base them on secular principles and I think that they hold up. Like if you need religion to be moral, then let's investigate why that's the case. Like, why is it the case that if God says you have to do something, that becomes the moral thing to do? I mean, what is it about that? Why should you do what God proclaims to be good? Like, is it because you want to avoid hell? Well, then it's just down to suffering again. Like, why should you want to avoid hell? What's wrong with going to hell? Well, it would hurt. Okay, like, then your argument is the same as mine. Do you think that God is just speaking ontological truths with his morality? Well, commands can't have truth value. You can't say, "Go over there." Is that true or false? That's a command. That can't be true or false.

• 50:36Alex O'Connor?

  Like, the same problems that you get with trying to ground morality without God, you get the same problems trying to do it in God. Like, it's just a kind of different... It's a different ballgame, but the problems still arise. So, I don't think it's true. And if it is the case that if you get rid of religion, moral virtue declines, then that isn't a problem with atheism. That's probably just a problem with the way that atheism's being branded. And the only people who are really going there, going around convincing people that if you're an atheist, you can get away with immorality, and that if you're an atheist, you don't need to have moral virtue, and if you're an atheist, you don't have to have moral principles. The only people who are advocating that view are the religious. If it is the case that getting rid of religion is getting rid of morality,

• 51:19Alex O'Connor?

  then that's because of the way that the religious have painted atheists' morality. If you speak to atheists, if we allow atheists to speak about their morality and have discussions that are popular about grounding morality in a godless universe, then we wouldn't have that problem. Because people would realize that we can ground morality just as easily, if not better, than we can ground religion. And if it does take a leap of faith, if it really is just a total bullshit to try and ground morality without God, then my argument would be, and maybe it does take a bit of intellectual acrobatics or a bit of intellectual ignorance to base your morality in a godless universe, but it takes less intellectual acrobatics than it takes to convince yourself

• 52:04Alex O'Connor?

  that a loving God exists, I think.

• 52:07Chris Williamson?

  I think certainly speaking to people about analogous topics, I don't understand, I'm a good avatar for the layperson when it comes to these sorts of discussions, but it's almost tropey now and very cliche for people to have this sort of wistful days gone by view of when things were better and

• 52:27Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, that's another thing, yeah.

• 52:29Chris Williamson?

  Families stuck together and you had the support of the church and you had this, that and the other. I think that certainly seems to me to be an argument that is put forward for this, that there was, there was just more social cohesion and the golden, golden days of when people actually used to look out for each other. All of these kind of very wishy washy nebulous tropey ephemeral, ephemeral sort of claims and statuses that get used. That I think is what a lot of people think they're referring to.

• 52:58Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, and look, I mean, that's, that's rose tinted glasses. It wasn't all as good as you think it was. And if you were to be dropped back in that society, maybe it would be okay depending on who you are. But if you're a gay person, you probably have a pretty horrible time. Now, why is it that if you went back to this golden age of morality and social cohesion, that as a gay person, you'd have a pretty bad time? Is it because of creeping secularism ruining your life? Or is it because of religious tyranny saying that you're not allowed to love the person that you love? I think that's probably the answer. Like, it's, it's, it's not, I mean, name a society that has been worsened by throwing off religious influence over government. Like, it can't be done. Like, the, all of

• 53:39Alex O'Connor?

  the social progression that you can think of is coincided with secularism. Every, every social progression has gone forward. Like, there's nothing that's gotten, there's nothing that's gotten, gotten worse in that, in that sense. Like, I, the, I don't know. I mean, it really depends on what the person means specifically when they're, when they're, when they're answering, when they're asking the question. Because if they do actually mean secularism, like on a governmental scale, well, Moral virtue shouldn't derive from the government. Like, you shouldn't be being good because the government says so, because the church says so. Moral virtue should be a private thing. You can, and secularism is, just as a secular government will protect my right to be an atheist, it'll protect your right to be a Muslim, or to be a Christian, or to be a Jew.

• 54:24Alex O'Connor?

  So if you think that morality does need to be grounded in Judaism, or Islam, or Christianity, then the best way that you can protect your religious freedom to express that religious morality is to live in a secular state that will not influence your church. Like, people think of secularism as the church not influencing the state. It's also the state not influencing the church. It's about a complete separation. So even if you do think, which I don't think is true, but even if you do think that you need religion to be a good person, then the best way to protect your right to be religious is still to live in a secular society.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  I had, recently had Zubey on the podcast, who's a rapper and actually an Oxford graduate from back in the day. A very, very interesting guy. And he's Christian. Given the sort of shows that he's on and the kind of discussions that he has, that was a surprise to me, to hear someone who has those particular worldviews and was still Christian, that was surprising. One of the things that he brought up that I thought was incredibly interesting was he said that he feels like people who are atheists sometimes are more religious, they're more theocratic about their atheism than some people who are religious are about their religion. And he said that he looks at the times that we're in now and sees people trying to find

• 55:44Chris Williamson?

  religion, he called it, in other things. So he said, people try and find religion in a football team, their favourite football team, they're very religious about their football team, or about their diet, about their particular approach to a diet. And I wondered what your thoughts were on that particular module in humans for...

• 56:04Chris Williamson?

  Something that fills that block that religion was in or is in.

• 56:08Alex O'Connor?

  Well, if that's true, then it's a criticism of religion. It just goes to show that religion has tried to monopolize the idea of social cohesion. People aren't striving for religion. They're not striving for some sky daddy to look after them when they're sleeping. They're looking for for connection with their with their fellow creatures. They're looking for camaraderie. They're looking for a way to get together and do something productive for the world. And some people believe that that's throwing yourself into a into a football community and supporting a team. Some people believe that's by going vegan and trying to to help the world. But like, it's got nothing to do with religion. And if you're someone who believes that that is religion, then you've been completely brainwashed into thinking that the only way that that as soon as somebody is trying to find friendship and community and do good in the world, that they're being religious.

• 56:53Alex O'Connor?

  Like, what are you talking about? If that's what religion is, then practically anything you can do is religious and any social activity becomes religious. And if everything is religious, then nothing is religious. Like, to call that religion is to do what you'd probably criticize in so many new atheists or new agey atheists, which are the people who go around and say like, they call anything their religion. They say like, oh, I'm not religious. I'm like a spiritual person. I believe in the earth and like I'm connected to the trees and things and that's my religion. It's like, you're just totally watering down the meaning of religion. Like, what's your definition of religion here? And a lot of people criticize, well, it's not so much a criticism of religion, but a lot of anthropologists,

• 57:35Alex O'Connor?

  not so much anymore, but certainly traditionally speaking, a lot of anthropologists thought that religion grew out of this. Like, the Durkheimian view is of religion growing out of a totally, it's a total social fact. It's completely social in its origin. And it comes from people kind of getting together and designated things as sacred and untouchable and separate from the rest of society in the same way that people would do that at a football game or with a flag or something or nationalism. And the religious get very annoyed at that. They say, you know, how could you possibly compare the two? Like, religion, religion comes from revelation. It comes from true facts about God. It doesn't come from some social progression or some some made up stories like a flag does. Like, it's a made up concept that we've just all chosen to believe in, but.

• 58:20Alex O'Connor?

  If this person is saying that that religion is essentially equitable with things like that, with things like nationalism, with things like football teams, then what does that say about religion? What's I thought religion was supposed to be based upon what's what's true, not what's like socially cohesive.

• 58:36Chris Williamson?

  Did religion just get first mover advantage?

• 58:40Alex O'Connor?

  How do you mean?

• 58:40Chris Williamson?

  So you have this particular module, this particular desire for people to have this social cohesion.

• 58:45Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Chris Williamson?

  And religion, in the same way as the iPhone, might not be the best touchscreen phone that's available, but it was the first one that got into most people's hands.

• 58:53Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 58:53Chris Williamson?

  Now they're getting grandfathered in. Is that what religion did? Did it get first mover advantage into this particular structure?

• 59:01Alex O'Connor?

  Well, it it depends how you're defining religion, but I mean, yeah, it it's like

• 59:06Alex O'Connor?

  the the earliest kind of forms of religion, that the the way that traditional anthropologists would try and understand religion is by looking at primitive religions, they'd go right back to the beginning and find what is it that they all had in common? Before they got all super complicated with doctrines and dogma, what is the actual essence of religion? What makes a religion a religion? And and no one could quite put their finger on it. Like, no one really knows. Religion is a very difficult thing to define.

• 59:30Alex O'Connor?

  But the I I also I don't see how that is necessarily a criticism of religion, like of of atheism. I I don't have a problem, or atheists don't have a problem with people

• 59:45Alex O'Connor?

  people, people arguing a case or or be or trying to get the government to do good things. Like, it's not, the problem isn't intrinsically trying to to put your views into into government action or to try and proselytize your views. The problem is that we don't think those views are correct. Like, if your views are correct, then of course you should be trying to to influence the government. Of course, you should be trying to to convince other people and and be shouting it in the streets and stuff like that. That's what I'm doing with veganism, and that's the that's the criticism that would come. It's like, well, you're being religious about it. No, I'm not being religious about it. I'm being steadfast about it. I think I'm correct, and therefore I'm I'm trying to argue that that's the case. And they're doing the same thing. It's like, I understand why you're doing that. Like, if I've if I thought that Christianity was true, I'd be doing everything.

• 1:00:29Alex O'Connor?

  Everything I could to make sure that my friends didn't burn in hell. I totally understand your position.

• 1:00:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Alex O'Connor?

  My problem isn't that you're, isn't that you're arguing your case or that you're being proselytizing about it or that you're, that you're being religious about it. My problem is I think you're wrong. That's all. Like the, the, the idea that it, it's, there's some kind of problem with, with shouting your views from the rooftop. Like, no, if, if they're correct, then that's what you should be doing.

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that first mover advantage thing and what you're talking about there, that people now with a lot of things, criticism as you've identified there. You're being religious about your veganism. It's that that first mover advantage and the pervasiveness of religion as a,

• 1:01:10Chris Williamson?

  this meta existence, this, this thing which is the first thing of all of its kind of things, requires us to use everything in relation to that again. That it's just, it's just a word that gets used and people use religious when they actually mean something that's a little bit different than necessarily mean religious.

• 1:01:27Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. But also, I mean, even if, even if that is what they mean, then why do you think, if, let's say that is the case, which I don't know if it is, but let's say it is the case that people are trying to kind of fill that God-shaped hole. Like, why is that the case? Do you think that might have something to do with the fact that these people grew up in societies and governments and families who told them that they're nothing without the religion that they were born into, that without God, they're worthless, that they can't have, that there's no basis for their moral worth if there's no God? Like, if you, if you grow up in a society that tells you that your meaning comes from religion, that your moral worth, that the fact that you are valuable as a human being comes from God, then when you give up that belief, of course, you're going to be looking for something to fill that gap.

• 1:02:08Alex O'Connor?

  Because you've grown up your entire life believing that there needs to be something there. Like, if it is the case that people, when they give up God, are desperate to find something to fill that gap, it's just a testament to how evil people have been in convincing people that they can't find moral virtue within themselves, that they can't realize that they have worth of their own accord, that they have worth because they can experience pleasures and pain and because they have preference and because they can be rational creatures. And that it has to be grounded in some metaphysical nonsense and that they have to go and make up some, some football team that doesn't actually exist, but it's just an imagined structure. They have to paint a flag and, and, and, and invoke some kind of meaning into the flag or something. If that is the case, it's only because.

• 1:02:52Alex O'Connor?

  People have been told from the day that they're born that if they don't do that, then they're nothing. Well, my whole point is that no, you don't need that. You can, you can find moral value, you can find moral worth without needing to, to make things up. You can ground it in what's real. And if you have a morality and a worth that's grounded in what's real, like, there's nothing better than that. There's no, there's no criticism that can, that can floor you. There's nobody who can come along and tell you that you're not worth something or that you're going to hell, because it isn't just a difference in opinion. It's not just your made up story versus his made up story. It's like, this is grounded in what I believe to be true. It's not just a social fact. It's, it's, it's a fact of nature, you know? I, I don't know. I, I enjoy talking to people like that.

• 1:03:33Alex O'Connor?

  Because I, I want to see what they mean. Because it doesn't really work when you relay a question like that to me, because I'd have to, I'd have to really get to the, to the base of what do you mean by religion? What do you mean by religious? What do you mean by God? What do you mean by, what, what kinds of activities are you talking about? What do you include? What do you not include? But I think, I think it's a false criticism. And even if it is a criticism, it's not a criticism of the truth or falsity of God exists. It has nothing to do with whether religion's true or not. That's just a commentary on whether, whether human beings need it or not. Like, even if it's the case that every human being really did need religion to be happy, doesn't mean it's true.

• 1:04:10Chris Williamson?

  You should get Zubey on the podcast. He's been invited out, he's flying out to LA this week. He's on Rogan next week. He's on Dave Rubin Show the week after that. But when he gets back, I'll, I'll link you two guys in an email. I think it'd be a really, it'd be a fascinating discussion. I'd love to see you guys go on. I think you'd really get on with him well. But Alex, today's been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, man. Can you tell the listeners, if they want to find out more, where should they head?

• 1:04:37Alex O'Connor?

  Of course. So Cosmic Skeptic is the name, and it's quite specific. So pretty much anywhere slash Cosmic Skeptic. So like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, all of that. If you just hit the forward slash Cosmic Skeptic, I've got all the URLs. So that's, that's where to find me. But Twitter's probably the main place to keep up with what I'm doing.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Alex, thank you so much for your time. Guys, if you've enjoyed this, make sure that you check Alex's YouTube channel out. It is fantastic. It's one of my favorites. As always, any comments, feedback that you have, feel free to get at me at Chris Will X, wherever you follow me. Like, share, subscribe, all that good stuff. But for now, Alex, thank you so much for your time.

• 1:05:09Alex O'Connor?

  Of course.

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  Offense. Yeah, oh yeah. Offense.