Vegan vs. Noam Chomsky (on Animal Rights)

we don't say that a a lion has to be
sent to the gas chambers it kills a gazelle that's a step forward in our general kind of moral development that animals are not subjected to torture in the way they were just a few years ago now constraints on the torture will be go experiment torture of at least animals that are closer to us like primates than there were 30 or 40 years ago but I don't think anyone thinks that animals have the rights and responsibilities of human beings what Noam Chomsky's had to say about vegetarianism veganism and animal rights has remained remarkably consistent for many years if you check around Google for a few minutes you can find different videos recorded at different periods of time of him saying almost exactly the same thing verbatim in an interview from 2010 you acknowledge that there exists a moral case for vegetarianism but at a recent talk at University College London you claim that animals cannot have the same rights as humans because lacking reason they cannot be considered to have responsibilities with regard to rights and responsibilities they do relate he presents a very simple narrative about the nature of Rights themselves claiming that rights are based on responsibilities and then proceeds to offer a sort of anecdotal claim that the rights of animals have improved dramatically since about 40 years ago because vivisection was much worse than United States in the 1950s than it is today he often adds vague disclaimers about the fact that he thinks that vivisection testing on animals is bad that the question of torturing animals or is worth asking and he also often vaguely states that he avoids eating meat although he is not vegetarian or vegan um so naturally the point of this video is to tell you that Noam Chomsky is completely right how could anyone possibly disagree with there's an opportunity cost of vegetarianism like personally I'm not a vegetarian but the main rule of almost never eat meat but the reason is just a lot of time for time to think about I don't I just pick up whatever saves me time you know it's funny he's normally being interviewed by people who basically worship Him and yet the people doing the interviews and the people standing in the background and so on when he's talking about animal rights they often kind of look at him like just tell nobody really finds this narrative convincing or adequate the factual side that I'm not really going to talk about here is that anyone is a five-minute Google search away from challenging the rather vague claims that Chomsky makes about tremendous progress in vivisection in laws restricting animal testing but above all else apart from the details depending on where you're living you can very quickly Google and see that you know the indifference and ineffective state of laws restricting vivisection animals it is what it is but of all the schools of thought whom you might expect to be skeptical of probing of such claims that the government can just write a law wave its magic wand and solve the problem of all the schools of political theory that would challenge that expectation anarchism would be one of them and the bizarre thing about Chomsky is that he continues to identify as an anarchist but there is absolutely nothing sincerely anarchistic in his approach to these facts now I just paused to clarify here despite the appearance of my desk and this t-shirt I'm not an anarchy you don't even want to know what these books are about man fewer books than huge won't my desk right now cuz I just finished an essay but I have more books than usual on the floor it's a good sign the concept that rights rests on responsibilities that they are reciprocal with that they depend upon responsibilities that's a popular notion in many schools of political science not all it's by no means Universal or default or unchallenged but among the prominent well-known schools that completely rejects that line of thought is anarchism pure and simple I wonder why there aren't sort of more anarchists outraged at Chomsky for doing such a bad job of representing them the belief that the federal government United States or any of the governments in Europe could resolve such an ethically loaded question as what happens to animals that are the property of scientific laboratories what happens to animals that fall into the tender mercies of research universities that claim to be curing cancer claim to be promoting the progress of science and use that as a justification to torture monkeys to death lab rats and what have you how really would it be possible to convince an anarchist if they were a sincere anarchist that government regulation the government legislation from the top down would solve this problem I'm not an anarchist I mentioned an earlier video that I think of anarchism as a set of theories that can answer some questions and not others that can be a useful mode of analysis or inquiry in some circumstances and not others you know anarchists are very good at complaining when government regulation fails to solve a problem and not so good at actually coming up with constructive solutions for say raising the level of human rights for workers in garment factories the first recourse people know reach for is legislation legislation to allow workers to unionize but also legislation to actually send a government inspector to visit the factory to make sure that people have access to bathrooms and drinking water you can tell I used to live in the tropics other people are not literally chained to their desks government regulation is the first resort and I don't know a pure anarchist might say well just allow the workers in the factory to carry guns on their job every day and let them sort it out that's an extremely unpopular political philosophy in the 21st century for some reason it doesn't seem to convince many people another approach to rights that is not based on the notion of Rights being reciprocal responsibilities is actually the idea that rights like any other form of legislation are based on avoiding harm this may sound strange and familiar to you if you stick with me for a minute you'll you'll learn just how common it is actually as an approach to rights and legislation um Chomsky's theory that all rights have to derive from or correlate to responsibilities supposedly invalidates the concept of animal rights because animals do not have responsibilities animals are not responsible under the law a wolf has no obligation to treat you with kindness therefore you have no obligation to treat the wolf with kindness that idea can be found in Latin written by Spinoza among other thinkers and it may be from Spinoza that Chomsky himself gets the idea Spinoza is a philosopher in case you didn't know from my disparaging tone of voice when I mention its name reducing harm is a different paradigm for why laws exist for why rights exist and we don't create these paradigms just to declare that human rights are the most wonderful thing in the world the purpose of a rights based approach in political science is ultimately to describe reality to analyze reality and to come up with policy recommendations how we can improve reality so under the harm based paradigm we then look at something like do you have the right to own a gun well in some parts of the United States you have the almost unlimited right to own a machine gun in Canada you don't what is the justification in either sense in both places it's in terms of harm how do you reduce harm but do I have the right to buy and use cocaine or heroin both sides of that argument the people who argue that heroin should be illegal and the people who argue that heroin should be decriminalized or made legal both sides pose their arguments in terms of harm reduction what will do the least harm to society what will allow individuals to help themselves etc so actually the notion that we establish rights like any other set of legal principles in order to reduce harm as a description of reality is analysis how the world works makes a lot of sense in terms of the Western parliamentary tradition that in Canada is mostly derived from England a few other sources of influence all of these approaches traditional jurisprudence they work just okay when we're talking about wild animals because they're the principal issue is harm it's pretty easy for the Western parliamentary system to legislate and regulate the interactions of human beings with bears and lions do you have the right to own a lion as late as the 1960s in England private citizens could buy lions and tigers and other dangerous cats and put them in the back yard of their houses there was no legislation preventing that and because of the British Empire a few people did it wasn't common over time accidents happen new laws get passed but very obviously the reasons why people are not allowed to own lions and bears etc has to do with harm and preventing harm so our legal paradigms work okay in those circumstances laws that prevent you from going into a piece of land that's specially reserved as a wilderness preservation area for bears laws that prevent you from hunting bears etc those are pretty straightforward those work okay the problem has been that this harm based paradigm the the basic assumptions of harm reduction were not applied to and were difficult even to conceptualize in relation to meat production and owning animals in order to exploit them how do we reduce harm now the paradox for non vegans is that a a harm reduction approach does not make sense if you are killing and eating animals at all for vegans things are much simpler for vegans we would still need those laws that govern bears and tigers in the wild we still need laws for wilderness preservation and for what to do if a bear actually climbs over your fence and it's in your backyard I live in Canada that does actually happen here you know who's gonna fire the tranquilizer dart and who's gonna pay for a truck to carry the bear away and put it back in the wilderness or what have you these are real questions we have to do it these are also at normal rates questions but the whole paradigm of modern Western jurisprudence breaks down and makes no sense at all when you're talking about this is a real example monkeys captured in the jungle along the border between Vietnam and Cambodia put on an airplane taken to England locked into a laboratory and then tortured until they die how do you reduce the harm in that situation now the legal questions surrounding that practice were ultimately raised by airlines because the airplanes that were being given the task of transporting these monkeys filmed it repugnant and then once the airline started kicking up a fuss then some people in the press started kicking up a fuss British Parliament sent an Committee of Inquiry sent some people to go and visit the the Vietnam Cambodia border where these monkeys were being captured and bizarrely what they decided again for the reasons I've been outlining here was that the legal change that had to happen was that it was no longer acceptable to torture monkeys to death in laboratories if they were born in the wild because then monkey wild monkeys fell under this category of habitat conservation of wilderness preservation however if the monkeys were born in a cage then they could be purchased as property and tortured to death with impunity etc the question of in praxis how universities actually regulate torturing animals to death usually I'm here generalizing with the whole Western world comes down to a committee system which is you know the worst kind of parody of democracy so within the university they ask rounds on the professor's a who's willing to sit on the animal rights committee they may not call it that they may call it the research protocol committee or the the ethics committee for animal research or what-have-you keep it vague the ethics committee that'll do and whatever six different professors get to put on their resume that they spent a couple hours here and they're sitting on an ethics committee and pieces of paper are shown to them to either approve or not approve and I do not know of any example anywhere in the world with this results in rigorous evaluation of what is and what is not necessary animal suffering I don't know of any example the world with this works to actually reduce harm to animals and one round of court cases and Lee decisions in Europe and so on after another they just have to confess this system doesn't work the Labour government in England many years ago set up a special committee not at the university level but at the government level that was supposed to review all applications for vivisection for torturing animals to death and a few years later people evaluated and what do you know it actually exists to promote vivisection there's no evaluation of what's necessary or unnecessary what have you it doesn't it does not work in the sense that it was a minute to work now so look what Noam Chomsky has to say on this subject is in a word stupid and ignorant and self-righteous that's about four words they're not including and um and as I say when you actually watch the videos I don't think anyone in the room with him when he's saying this stuff finds it convincing or impressive nobody even has the feeling that this guy has looked into it has done a couple Google searches to figure out how animal-rights intersection of change over the last bunch of years uh but this is interesting because Chomsky is allegedly an anarchist and this is actually an example of a subject where the the whole tradition the thousand year long tradition of British law and parliamentary decision-making legal norms rights based rules were they break down and become meaningless so if there's one school of thought that really should be able to tear into this issue and have something meaningful to say it's exactly the school of thought that Noam Chomsky claims he represents anarchism