Vegan vs. Michael Shermer's Moral Philosophy

I can remember a time not too long ago
when people used to really complain that there were no more public intellectuals and I think some people are tempted now to hold the new generation of public intellectuals to a very low standard because they're just so delighted that these people exist at all that they're on TV at all that they're on the radio I see that a lot with guys like Noam Chomsky to be perfectly honest a lot of his supporters not necessarily even because their left-wing a lot of people just feel delighted that someone who's a seemingly respectable university professor saying seemingly intellectually sophisticated things manages to get into the mainstream media and they celebrate that fact but really we should hold them to the same high standards they proposed for themselves and a guy like Michael Shermer has emerged lately from what I would call the new atheist movement the attempt to kind of repackage atheism and secularism as some kind of political cause in the United States he has emerged as a public intellectual as someone who comments on politics and who frames himself as a moral and ethical philosopher in our times so given that high standard please consider the following quotation that I'm going to read to you that's sounds like something you might expect to see I don't know written in a chat room on a reddit page by some anonymous commenter quote I don't mind eating cows and fish but dolphins and whales have big brains and they're cool so I don't think we should kill them period close quote ladies and gentlemen Michael Shermer leader of the reason rally proponent of so-called critical thinking says I don't mind eating cows and fish but dolphins and whales have big brains and they're cruel so I don't think we should kill them I will provide the link below this video to the contacts that comes from from my perspective the paragraph that's embedded in does not make it sound any better I think it makes it sound rather worse he says oh well you know I Drive a sport utility vehicle because I haul around bicycles books and dogs but as soon as there's a hybrid available and the right size I'll buy it instead weakness and strength are not a morally neutral things one of the strange influences in our culture I think is that so many of us grew up reading comic books reading about Batman Superman these types of characters with a question of strength the question of ability is never the the moral puzzle for people it's striking to me here with Shermer and also in reading and listening to god with sam harris boy i'm almost proud that i've forgotten that guy's name the material from sam harris lately I'm really struck by the the apparent weakness of these men the the hyper indulgent ISM the the tremendous inability to put off to defer even the slightest of pleasures for the sake of a moral principle that was in sam Harris's excuses for not being vegan before and it's in michael schirmer's excuses for not being vegan now I remember some comments from Sam Harris where he was talking about his problems with the the morality of what cellular phones are made from because cellular phones use minerals that come from certain conflict zones and the guy interviewing him pointed oh you know there's this website where you can buy a morally sourced cell phone then the cell phone apparently they give you a guarantee and they if you want to you can look through all the fine print they tell you where all the components come from they guarantee none of them are produced by slave labor if from the mines through to the factories they all meet certain conditions so if you want to you can go to this website you can get cell phones that have this seal of approval and theses response is I don't believe that being a morally good person should mean that you have to have a bad phone so so your your morality is is not a sufficiently high priority in your life that you would be willing to get a slightly less fashionable a slightly less fleek a slightly less featured cellular phone than the one you were now using let me let you in on a little secret folks you may have noticed I have these books sitting around my desk all the time and I'm always complaining that I look exhausted when I'm on camera because I am exhausted and so on I have never owned a cellular phone never in my life when I was in China once I borrowed somebody's cellular phone for uh I guess about two weeks that's it that's the only experience I've ever had and I needed that sort of phone because I was I was looking for work I was trying to get a job and I couldn't get any other kind of phone number no other exceptions so I'm not telling you how to notice cellular phone but actually I was using my girlfriend's phone all this time with no you know it's possible to live in the 21st century without a cellular phone and I feel I don't feel I lead a less meaningful life goes but I feel a little more meaningful life anyway again if you're just some anonymous guy commenting on a on an Internet message board okay fine I'm not gonna hold you to some terribly high standard but these guys put themselves forward as major intellectuals in positions of public leadership and this is both the stupidity of what they have to say on some of the crucial moral issues of our time moral issues we can actually make a difference about I mean I'm sorry you know if you want to have an opinion about Isis the odds are you're not one of the people whose opinion matters is gonna make any kind of a difference you want to have a pinion about veganism it's gonna make a difference for university professor like Michael Shermer is you want to have opinion about vivisection on your campus in your university where you're a member of tenured faculty that's going to make a difference you can stop buying leather today you can stop eating meat tomorrow you know you can go vegan now this is a positive difference in the world that is within your power to make all kinds of other questions are merely hypothetical there's another article that Michael Shermer wrote on this in which he reflects that he saw some documentary film might as well get it right speciesism the movie I've seen him comment elsewhere on the internet that he did see Earthlings and had some kind of emotional reaction to it so he'd watched these various probe vegan documentary films he has his kind of humming and hawing and response to it yeah just just to digress for half a moment here where is Michael Shermer live Altadena California a suburb of Los Angeles a short drive or a long bicycle ride outside of downtown Los Angeles there were probably fewer places in the world that it was easier to be vegan than the suburbs of LA honestly look honestly I used to live in a society one in the middle of Canada it's tough to be vegan as a schedule it is I used to live in the south of France it's very different but in some ways being vegan and so the France also is tough Los Angeles Southern California how low a priority are these moral principles that you preach you Michael Shermer you I mean these guys again if if it was somebody else if this was the coach of a football team I was quoting saying whoa a little more didn't cows and fish but dolphins and whales have big brains and they're cool so I don't think we should kill them if that was the the coach of you know the the Oakland Raiders I'm dating myself with that cultural reference Oakland Raiders nobody would complain okay but you're putting yourself forward as a major public intellectual author raconteur leader of a social movement and this is the level of engagement of this okay so in the second link of providing below the video he has his sort of indifferent attitude towards these issues he's just seen in a documentary film and he comments that various people make the analogy between treatment of cows and pigs and slaughterhouses and what happened in the Holocaust the extermination of Jews during World War two during the Nazi period in Central Europe and Eastern Europe and all over the place ah you know what I'm talking about quote historian Charles Patterson draws the analogy in his 2002 book eternal Treblinka and DeVries makes a visual reference to it by comparing the layout of factory farm buildings to that of prisoner barracks at Auschwitz the flaw in the analogy is in the motivation of the perpetrators as someone who has written a book on the Holocaust titled denying history 2009 I see a vast moral gulf between farmers and Nazis even factory form pardon me even factory farm corporate suits motivated by profits are still far down the moral ladder from out Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler there are no signs at factory farms reading Arbeit macht frei yet I cannot fully rebuke those who equate factory farms with concentration camps while working as a graduate student in experimental psychology in an animal lab in 1978 at California State University it was my job to dispose of lab rats that had outlived our experiments I was instructed to you thin out and euthanize them with chloroform but I hesitated I wanted to take them up into the local hills and let them go figuring that death by predation or starvation was better than gassing but releasing lab animals was illegal so I exterminated them with gas it was one of the most dreadful things I ever had do close quote uh yeah there were many differences between the production of meat on factory farms and the Holocaust you know what one of them is um Michael sure if I had to ask you to join the army and fight in a war in which you would quite likely be injured or die to end the Holocaust I would be asking quite a lot of you if you were in France and I asked you to join a unit of the French Resistance to in effect join a a terrorist group fighting against the Nazis to live in secrecy to live a double life to smuggle munitions perhaps across the border into France to fight against the Nazis for years depriving yourself of normal food shelter work relaxation family friends etcetera that would be asking a lot and hundreds of thousands millions of people did that millions of people died fighting the Nazis all that anyone is asking you to do to address the animal Holocaust I'll put my hands in the air - were the quote unquote animal Holocaust is to stop eating meat and dairy is to live a vegan lifestyle in Southern California in Los Angeles in what is probably the world capital of luxury quality vegan restaurants and you with your handsome income as a university professor with you're a luxury home in Altadena California with your SUV that you feel you can't give up until you have a bigger hybrid because you like driving around with your dogs and your bicycles loaded into the back you can do it it's asking and incredibly small sacrifice you're given to me in my mind what leaps out is you know ok Sam Harris moral philosopher you can write a whole book about moral philosophy but you don't think you can use a slightly less fashionable cell phone for the sake of your morals what the hell does that say about you oh yeah so michael shermer you see you have this emotional connection to animals because you had to gas some of them to death when you're working in a lab something to do with vivisection some kind of animal experimentation I don't know what exactly uh yeah gee you know and you you admit that there's a similarity between what you've seen in these documentaries and Holocaust you just can't give up the hamburgers look what the hell does that say about you it says that you should not be in a position of leadership neither as an author nor is a political leader at cetera it says a lot about you Michael Shermer it's it's a damning judgment on your character now in case you hadn't guessed I am of Jewish ethnic origin and I do have relatives who died in the Holocaust in my life I met a new one Holocaust survivor and I knew people who were old enough to have memories of that war on different sides I knew one guy who grew up in the shadow of the Nazi side he was a child during World War two but his parents were Nazis and so on like you know I'm I'm not really old enough to have a direct connection over history but I have some indirect connections to the echoes of that chapter of history you know what there were many moral differences I mean analogy is by definition a comparison between two things doesn't presume they have a lot in common they might just have one thing in common I can have two different books on my desk here that are both read they're comparable only in the color of the book they're about different topics nothing wrong with it nothing wrong with an analogy with a comparison between two fundamentally dissimilar things but you know what as Hobbs says in his famous book Leviathan man is a wolf to man homo homini lupus asked when you look at the history of political massacres in the history of human civilization the Nazis are one example the Communists have plenty of examples to give another funny example within Spain you know fascist Spain they massacred people on the pretext of those people were members of a freemason conspiracy totally factious totally false allegations but it was enough of an excuse to start rounding up at enemies of the fascist regime and executing in large numbers to you'd be surprised that ones less famous in all of those massacres though the reality is that human beings really are a threat to other human beings one of the justifications given by Nazis themselves for why the Holocaust happened was that they didn't want it to be possible for the next generation of their enemies to take revenge on so there is fear involved nobody has this justification for killing cows you know no look I live in Canada there is this justification for killing bears sometimes people get attacked by bears here and they actually have to shoot and kill the Bears and self-defense that's no joke that really happens in Canada if you've lived in Canada long enough you've probably met someone who said that experience it's not that uncommon depends what part of Canada you're from sure their attacks that's one thing but the production of food that nobody needs and that is not good for anyone's health that as a scientific fact is bad for everybody's health universally unhealthy universally unnecessary food to produce that through the suffering and extermination of animals that are not a threat to you this will never have the excuse of self-defense this will never even have the excuse of self-aggrandizement nobody is building an empire this way nobody is for example conquering Russia through this violence nobody is expanding their power or what-have-you I am not saying this to excuse mass murder in history of the world not at all but in most mass murders there is either the perceived or actual fear that if one side doesn't kill the other side then somehow circumstances will be reversed and the other side will be the ones doing the killing in China and Cambodia under communism part of the whole reason for the fever-pitch of exterminating class enemies was exactly the fear that if you don't kill them now that counter revolutionaries will turn around they'll get you look into the eyes of a cow sometime Michael Shermer nobody is afraid that the cows are gonna take over the way the Communists were afraid that counter revolutionaries are going to take over nobody is afraid that the pigs are part of a conspiracy the way that the fascists in Spain were afraid that the Freemasons were all part of a conspiracy and you know look some time at the diagram of a cow's skull on the size of its brain because your justification for eating meat Michael Shermer is quote I don't mind eating cows and fish but dolphins and whales have big brains and they're cool