Animal Minds & Moral Truths: A Conversation with Peter Singer (Episode #342)

If animal research could be useful to humans only if animals are deeply psychologically analogous to humans in their suffering, then that makes the ethical treatment of animals even more important; conversely, if animals are not psychologically analogous to humans, then animal research cannot generate useful knowledge about human conditions—either way, animal research faces a logical dilemma.

“if this work really is to translate into our understanding of human suffering, it will only translate because these animals are deeply analogous to humans in their suffering. And if they are deeply analogous to humans in their suffering, well, then that makes our mistreatment of them all the more odious ethically speaking. So, in so far as this work could be useful, it approaches the, you know, ethical asymptote of just the the the monstrosity of treating other sentient beings in this way. And in so far as they're not at all analogous and the suffering is you know, in a Cartesian sense really just an illusion. Well, then why are we doing the work in the first place?”

Animal research ethics committees (institutional animal care and use committees in the United States) were introduced as a result of pressure from animal advocates, and Singer expected them to improve animal research standards more than they actually have.

“one of the things that it has happened and was a result, I suppose, of pressure on scientists from the animal community was the introduction of what are generically known as as animal experimentation ethics committees, but in the United States are known as institutional animal care and use committees. And these are committees that look at proposals for experiments...I'd been led by some people to think that they were doing an effective job...I was really disturbed in writing that chapter. I was disturbed in writing the experimentation chapter in the original edition in 1975, but I had expected things to have improved more than they have.”

The major factory farming methods raise animals in locked huge sheds containing thousands or even tens of thousands of animals (particularly chickens), maximizing production efficiency at the cost of giving them no semblance of normal life, in order to keep flesh prices low.

“to lock them in huge sheds by the thousands or even tens of thousands in the case of chickens just to produce the flesh more cheaply than we would be able to do if we gave them a life that is more normal for them in a flock of 30 or 40 hens or chickens maybe and running around outside.”

Effective altruism has suffered PR damage from the Bankman-Fried scandal, which critics cynically interpreted as confirmation that altruism is merely virtue signaling and status-seeking, rather than genuine efforts to improve the world, confirming the prejudices of those skeptical of philanthropic motivations.

“quite unhappily, the cynicism uh with which this project was was viewed by many people who take a dim view of effective altruism and or even a a view of dim view of altruism as well. I mean, just see the kind of the Ayn Rand types in Silicon Valley who think that it's all just virtue signaling”

The Bankman-Fried case is a tragedy viewed from multiple perspectives, including that of his parents who are both Stanford law professors, and it exemplifies a dramatic arc of rise and fall comparable to ancient Greek tragedy.

“Just how fully he soared in the estimation of everyone, and then immolated. What's been your experience as certainly one of the patriarchs of effective altruism in the um the advent of of the um the Sam Bankman-Fried catastrophe? Well, it it it it it has been a tragedy. I think that's a a a good way to describe it. It's a tragedy viewed from many different perspectives. You mentioned Sam's parents professors of law at Stanford.”

Insects likely cannot suffer at all or suffer far less than larger animals with vastly more neurons, and therefore the moral concern for insect suffering is minimal or zero, though we cannot be entirely certain about insect sentience.

“a bug that hits our windscreen may not be capable of suffering at all and I agree that's it's certainly we can't be certain that insects feel pain. And if it does suffer, then we assume that the suffering is in some way less than ours, that the capacities for suffering are far less, you know, the bug has far fewer vastly fewer neurons than we have.”

An anencephalic infant (born with only a brain stem, no cerebrum, destined never to be conscious) has less moral significance than a dog, cow, or pig because those animals can experience things and have good or bad lives from their perspective, whereas the anencephalic infant will never have conscious experiences.

“their their life in itself has less significance or importance than the life of a dog or a cow or a pig because those beings can experience things and can have good lives or bad lives from their perspective.”

It is morally uncontroversial that the misery and death of X number of people or animals is less bad than the misery and death of a thousand times X people or animals, all else being equal.

“I mean, I just I It strikes me as morally uncontroversial that the misery and death of X number of people or animals is just, you know, all things being equal is is not as bad as the misery and death of a thousand X number of the same people or animals.”

Sam Bankman-Fried was a poster boy for the effective altruism concept of 'earning to give'—the idea that talented people should maximize income through lucrative careers and donate those earnings to effective charities rather than directly doing good work—and he appeared to exemplify this principle by accumulating vast wealth explicitly for philanthropic purposes.

“he seemed to earn more money than almost anyone in human history, and he was earning it explicitly for the purpose of doing all the good he could do...And he seemed to be the the living confirmation of all of their prejudices...There are many people who who view really any any philanthropy uh along those lines...a a view of dim view of altruism as well. I mean, just see the kind of the Ayn Rand types in Silicon Valley who think that it's all just virtue signaling, and any pretensions to the contrary is just kind of human vanity uh and uh you know, status signaling under some other guise.”

Learned helplessness experiments in dogs involved training dogs to escape electric shock, then placing barriers to prevent escape, causing dogs to stop attempting escape after repeated shocks and passively accept the shock, with experimenters interpreting this as a model of depression in humans.

“you train an animal to be able to escape an electric shock. So, a dog, for example, would be put in a in a sort of cage enclosure that had two sides to it, and it had a wire floor on both sides, but you could electrify the floor on one side. And the dog would then feel the shock and would rapidly jump onto the other side of this box where there was no electric shock, and it would learn to do that. But then at some point, you put up a barrier, so the dog can't jump away from the electric shock. And as the experimenters themselves describe, after a large number of attempts to escape...the dog will eventually give up the attempt to escape and will simply lie on the electrified floor and passively accept the shock. And the idea was that this would be in some way a model for depression.”

Speciesism operates through the same mechanism as racism and sexism: a dominant group uses technological or other advantages to subjugate another group, then develops an ideology to justify that subjugation, as when Europeans used technology to enslave Africans and developed ideologies of racial superiority, or when male-dominated societies denied women property rights and voting rights.

“in at least in say in the 18th century when the slave trade was at its height, that group was Europeans who had technology that Africans did not have and could capture or buy Africans, send them on a horrible voyage across the Atlantic in a ship and sell them into slavery. And obviously, you know, they could do that because they had that technology and then they developed an ideology which justified it.”

Parkinson's disease affects millions worldwide and is a terrible, slow-acting condition; research to alleviate its symptoms could be defended if there were really no other way to find the treatment, as an example of animal research that might be justifiable.

“One example that I give in the book is is research to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's disease which many of listeners will know somebody has Parkinson's disease or may have it themselves in their early stages and it is a a terrible condition and it affects well, millions of people worldwide. So, if you could find if you if you have something that really has good hopes of curing the disease or in the case of the research that I mentioned in the book, alleviating the symptoms of the disease which is an important part of course as it's a slow-acting disease. I think you know, you could defend that if there were really no other way to to find that treatment”

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) tends to focus on experiments that are not curing children's cancers as a matter of effective activism tactics, focusing on less defensible cases rather than the hardest cases, but this tactic creates pressure to maintain a strict party line against all animal experimentation even including potentially justifiable medical research.

“I think actually that PETA does tend to focus on the experiments which are not curing our children's cancers and that's obviously good tactics if you want to change something. You don't want to tackle the hardest cases, you want to tackle the cases that will be more widely accepted by the public. But but there's a lot of pressure of course, you know, as with with with any group or political group of activists, lobbyists, there's a lot of pressure to sort of stick to a a party line and not allow much nuance in your position.”

The chapter on animal experimentation in Animal Liberation Now reveals that psychological experiments on animals—particularly learned helplessness studies—are often pointless, unnecessary, and sadistic, continuing practices that should have been eliminated by institutional animal care committees but largely have not been.

“the most disturbing chapter in your book, I think was probably because I was much less familiar with the details, was for me the chapter on animal experimentation, which is I I have to say it's like it's almost unbelievable that you know, especially in in psychological science that we did and continue to do, it sounds like these experiments that just seem not only pointless and unnecessary, but just sadistic and insane”

Steven Pinker wrote in Better Angels of Nature that when he was a graduate student in psychology, he conducted what he describes as one of the worst things he's ever done—torturing a rat to death—but claimed that the difference between the 1960s and present time is 'like the difference between night and day,' though this claim appears to be false based on current animal research practices.

“Steven Pinker, for example, said wrote in in Better Angels of Nature that when he was a graduate student in psychology, he did what he says was one of the worst things I've ever done. And he himself describes it as torturing a rat to death...But he then says, you know, well, that happened whatever the date was in the 1960s, I guess, when Steven was a graduate student. But the difference now is like the difference between night and day. And unfortunately, it's not. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of research that gets through these institutional animal care and use committees that really should not be done.”

Treating all guns as though they are always loaded, even after verification that they are not, is a wise discipline that prevents negligent discharge injuries and deaths, and it is analogous to a useful heuristic of valuing all human lives equally as a bulwark against the kinds of eugenic and genocidal evils that emerged from capacity-based discrimination in Nazi Germany.

“treat a gun as though it is always loaded, right? And even if you know, if you're handing me a gun, you will check to see that it's loaded and you'll check it in a way that is quite redundant...it is in fact true that when you know, if you have just handed me a gun, which I've watched you check to see whether or not it's loaded and I've checked it once and I've checked it twice, it's not true that I actually believe the gun might still be loaded...I'm engaged in a kind of religious ritual, right? And yet it is a truly wise one.”

Animal model research for PTSD is unlikely to be effective because humans have different awareness of what is happening, discuss trauma with others as a social process, and experience humiliation from abuse in ways that rats likely do not.

“Is this a really a model of human post-traumatic stress disorder? It seems very unlikely because it seems that we have a different kind of awareness of what's going on and we talk about it with other people. It's a social thing as as well. We may feel that we were humiliated because we were abused and mistreated, which perhaps a rat does not feel or not feel in the same way”

Harris took a pledge through Will MacAskill's organization, Giving What We Can, to give 10% of his pre-tax income to effective charities, and he has subsequently learned that over 10% of members who took that pledge referenced Harris's podcast in explaining their decision, representing over $300 million in pledged donations.

“I took that pledge through Will MacAskill's organization, Giving What We Can, and uh I've since heard from Will that over 10% of the members who have taken that pledge have referenced this podcast in their explanation of why they decided to do that. And that represents over $300 million in pledged donations.”

Harry Harlow's maternal deprivation experiments with monkeys and apes involved sadistic variations including wire-frame 'mothers,' mothers that delivered electric shocks or stabbed the infant, and mothers that emitted loud frightening sounds, suggesting sadism on Harlow's part based on both the experimental procedures and his writing about them.

“Harry Harlow was the one who really started this series of experiments back in the 1950s and then I mean he really did horrendous things as you say that you you have to suspect there was some kind of sadism behind this from from the things he did and from the way he wrote about it, right? I mean he used terms like he created a tunnel of terror, he calls it to frighten these monkeys to see if he could see what you know, pathology mental pathology developed and then he he he he got these neurotic female monkeys and he wanted to see how they reacted with their own babies, but they wouldn't allow the males to mate with them. So, then he constructed what he calls in his own paper a rape rack.”

Stephen Suomi, a student of Harry Harlow, continued maternal deprivation research and received large grants from the National Institutes of Health until PETA opposition and advocacy led to the experiments stopping around 2015.

“One of them was Stephen Suomi who got continued to get large grants from the National Institutes of Health in the United States supporting this research until finally people for the ethical treatment of animals, PETA as it's more commonly known, the animal group, aroused opposition to them and I think they stopped in 2015, something like that”

Harris argues that a moral hierarchy does exist based on graduated differences in sentience and capacity for suffering across species, using the 'windshield test' (a bug splattering on a windscreen causing minimal concern) as an intuitive illustration of this graduated moral status.

“I think most people have a a natural or you know, culturally acquired intuition that there is a moral hierarchy here. I often think about this in terms of what I'm now going to dub as the windshield test. I mean if if you're driving home in a car and a bug splatters on the windshield, you may not feel much of anything about it. I mean it's not it's certainly not a moral emergency”

Both Harris and Singer continue to support effective altruism with various shadings and caveats, and both share concerns about the movement while recognizing its core insights.

“both Peter and I continue to support it just with um various shadings and caveats”

Martin Seligman, credited as the father of positive psychology, conducted learned helplessness experiments on animals and seemed to have endorsed them as important even up to the present.

“Martin Seligman, who's often credited as the father of positive psychology, was among the people who has done these experiments and seemed to have endorsed them as important even up to the present”

There are still many research experiments approved by institutional animal care and use committees that are clearly very painful and distressing to animals and continue in the United States and many other countries.

“there are still a lot of research that gets through these institutional animal care and use committees that really should not be done, that is clearly very painful and distressing to the animals. And it is being done in the United States, but also in in many other countries”

The slippery slope argument against euthanasia was widely used in Netherlands debates in the 1980s when voluntary medical assistance in dying began, with opponents predicting it would lead to killing people regarded as useless, intellectually disabled, or politically undesirable, though this argument seemed to have weight because the practice was unfamiliar at the time.

“that argument was widely used in the debate about voluntary euthanasia when it first got started in the Netherlands in the 1980s when doctors began assisting patients to die on their request and the courts allowed them to do that saying that they faced a conflict of duties of the unbearable suffering of their patients. And many opponents said, 'This is going to lead to a slippery slope. We will end up killing off people who are, you know, regarded as useless or intellectually disabled or even politically undesirable.'”

Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation was first published in 1975 (though Singer published an article on animal liberation in the New York Review of Books in April 1973), marking approximately 50 years of influence on animal ethics and the animal welfare movement.

“the book first came out in '71? 1975 was when it came out. Yeah, that's right. So, it's not quite 50 years for the book. It's 50 years since I first actually published something on this topic, which was an article called Animal Liberation in the New York Review of Books in April 1973.”