Unnecessary Evil: Why Becca Bristow Won't "Go Vegan".

so today's video it's gonna be a little
bit different than what I know really do the video I'm responding to here is unusual because it openly declares itself to be a philosophy a philosophical argument essentially like my diet philosophy and specifically why I will not go vegan the woman recording the video says to the camera directly this is her philosophy of why she eats meat her philosophy of why she is not vegan her philosophy of diet of nutrition and of life in general she explains to you that from her perspective life is short and from her perspective life is about nothing more than your enjoyment of it my overall diet philosophy in a nutshell is pretty much enjoying my life because I never know when it's actually going to end and treating my body in a way that is not going to definitively short in my life through poor dietary habits a bonus Yin for me as a vegan it's easy to be self-righteous you say shut it all down natural settle the animals free that's easy put the whole reason why my youtube channel exists is that I'm not really interested these the answers to complicated question I'm addressed until all the murky complicated you know moral gray areas she seeks in her life a balance between what is healthy and what is enjoyable so she is declaring her life is not about achieving and sustaining optimal nutrition I think implicitly she is also telling you that her life is not about achieving and sustaining optimal morality there's a considerable distraction here and I'll say why she offers this distraction there's a considerable distraction in that she offers a very unfill Asafa chol argument the veganism while it works for some does not work for everybody and I think it's really quite shameful for her because she is a woman of science shall we say she's a woman with this formal education in Dietetics and nutrition she ought to be able to argue that in a scientific manner or clarify exactly what her claim is what does it mean for you to say that not everybody can be vegan I'll come back to that there are some some very rare anecdotes there are people who have really extraordinary health problems that mean they can't be vegan but to say so vaguely in such a pseudo-scientific way if I may use the term to say so vaguely the veganism just isn't gonna work for everybody she muddies the water with this argument and it's an argument that's not connected to philosophy I think she spent so much time on this fundamentally irrelevant point about veganism not working for everybody because she feels uncomfortable herself with the implications of defending the eating of meat as something that is unhealthy and unnecessary we're all really accustomed to hearing the eating of meat justified as a necessary evil but she's actually starting her argument off on the footing that she knows it's unnecessary she knows it's unhealthy but that she is going to accept it in her life anyway as a form of pleasure and it's a form of pleasure that she knows causes harm harm to the environment harm in a very real sense to our society but most obviously indirectly harm to animals harm and suffering to animals one point that I've made before in one of my last 400 videos on this channel I don't remember which is that actually very very few people do live their lives as if the meaning of life were pleasure were just enjoyment and when you look at extreme examples like the use of cocaine I think you see very clearly how what she claims she lives by is a principle that very very few people really believe or could really live with why do you refuse to use cocaine maybe you have an answer off the top of your head like you had a friend in high school who used cocaine and it destroyed his life you had a terrible experience maybe you have some scientific anecdotes about the damage that cocaine does to your brain or what have you but hey as she says life is short life is short I'm not talking about the difference between occasional cocaine use and becoming an addict I'm talking about why would you choose to live your life with absolutely zero use of cocaine if you really think about it for yourself and others I think that millions and millions of people a very large percentage of people they make that decision not just to refuse cocaine today at tomorrow not just to refuse it this weekend but to never use it because they value the feeling that they are a good person it may be very vague as a moral concept but the sense that being a good person is more important than using cocaine this weekend or once a month or once a year is actually something that guides the decisions human beings make in a very powerful and pervasive way now if you ask me do I really believe that using cocaine makes you a bad person I can ask you in return if you have a daughter and your daughter has a new boyfriend and you know that he uses cocaine sometimes not that he's an addict maybe it's once a month maybe it's a couple times a year you tell me do you regard him as a good person whether it's your co-worker your daughter's new boyfriend or anyone else moral judgment is real let's not pretend that we don't make moral judgments when we're in the middle of evaluating an ethical argument which is what this is I'm trying to enjoy my life I thought my point in making this allegory with cocaine was completely obvious but apparently nobody else did so I'm adding in this clarification here guys on take two so to speak look it's very easy philosophically for someone to claim that they live just for pleasure or in this woman's case she only is seeking out a balance of pleasure and not damaging her health so badly then it's gonna shorten her life it's easy to say oh really it's hard to live by I'm actually very skeptical when someone makes a claim like this that they just lived for today and not for tomorrow they just live for pleasure and for nothing else in fact when you sit down and talk to people when you get to know people what you discover is the real range of action that they engage in their real range of sensual indulgence --is is incredibly limited and it's limited above all else by their own ego by their own sense of what it is to be a good person if this woman really was living a life in the reckless pursuit of sensual pleasure with the only limit being that she didn't want to die young that being the only constraint then I don't think her life would be anything like what we see on YouTube on the contrary this idea that life is short that you gotta recklessly pursue your pleasures it's just being invoked here as an excuse for eating meat but in fact it would be a much better excuse for the use of cocaine or what have you and we see she's not doing that and most of us whatever our explicitly stated reasons are we're not using cocaine because of some sense of what it means to be a good person and vegans differ from reduce at Aryans vegans are different from people who are merely trying to cut back on me who try to eat less for the sake of their health because they try to eliminate it absolutely and if that's hard to relate to you should probably consider that the majority of people don't just cut back on cocaine they want to eliminate it absolutely because they feel that if they just dabbled in it if they just used it once in a while or even just once a month that would have an impact on how they think about themselves how they feel about themselves the answer they have to give when they look in the mirror and ask am i a good person life is short one of my few original ideas in life honestly I haven't had that many one of my few was at the end of my time in university the first time around University of Toronto I'd read a lot of moral philosophy I read a lot of ethics philosophy in the Western tradition and Asian traditions or what have you and you know I came to the conclusion that the basic concept of ethics itself relies on the assumption that there's a meaningful connection between what we know and how we feel it's very hard to enjoy something when you know it is doing harm to another person it's very hard to enjoy something if you know that it causes an animal suffering and you have to watch that animal suffering while you enjoy it now the awareness of an animal suffering of maybe just today I went to the market to buy fruit and vegetables and I saw a fish suffocating to death on the market floor writhing leaping up and down in agony I don't eat fish I'm a vegan it doesn't impact me in that way but it still makes it hard for me to enjoy buying vegetables I think if you sit at the dinner table and actually watch a cow having its throat cut you watch a pig being killed in front of you while you're eating bacon I think it's very very hard on a visceral level for people to enjoy that food if they don't disassociate the experience from the harm that they're doing and this applies to many many things in life I don't want to get any examples that Archie Rose probably as a child probably as a young person you had the experience of really enjoying something and only finding out later that it broke somebody else's heart that somehow it hurts somebody whether in a purely emotional sense it made somebody else jealous it made your parents worried that it caused some kind of concern or harm that maybe impalpable or if you really did something I remember I knew some boys and they stole a bunch of they stole a bunch of thermometers from a science lab and smashed them up over a grade and because they wanted to play with the ether mercury and I remember for me when I found out this story I was just horrified don't you know mercury is toxic don't you know you're dumping mercury into the river because gonna go down the storm grate and don't you know you're destroying a laboratory um you know the basic premise of morality itself or that we can speak in a systematic way about ethics tends to rely on the assumption that how you feel about something is gonna change based on what should know about it and I think that many of you even if you're a meat-eater if you were eating something like a hot dog and then you found out it was made of a dog an actual dog or you found it was made with human meat that you were engaged in cannibalism it might knowing that wouldn't change the taste but it might really change how you feel it might change your enjoyment of what it is you're eating in a sudden and unexpected way what I know changes how I feel many many of the criminals who engage in petty crimes for example stealing a purse they actually feel that when they are put in prison that they themselves are the victim of a crime many of them go to prison and feel that they did something trivial they stole someone's purse and yet here they are going to prison for two years and they'll have other narratives in their mind they have a friend and he only went to prison for a few months but he did something much more serious or they read a story in the newspaper but celebrity who got away with a crime so it's very easy for them to construct in their own minds a narrative that their own crime was trivial nobody was really harmed and that they as the criminal are in fact the victim and then very often they're shocked when they sit down and watch a video and they for the first time understand that for the person who had their purse stolen it wasn't just the loss of a purse it had all these other impacts in their life and that they personally lived with fear that then whenever they walk down the same street where they were robbed before they were looking around the way they felt and the impact on their lives very often the criminal only then suddenly realizes the harm and they feel very differently about their own crime and their own situation in that prison what they know changes how they feel and when you look at a more extreme crime like rape the vast majority of people are not rapists a minority are the vast majority of people cannot enjoy sex if they're aware that they're harming somebody at the time and when we talk about malicious rape rape that's carried out sadistically knowing that the other person is experiencing fear and misery and so on it's in a very different category from a sort of drunken date rape and what-have-you situations where the perpetrator is not even aware that he's harming the person and may only found out find out later that harm has been done knowing that you're doing harm maybe it's just harm to the particular Pig to the particular cow maybe it's harm to the environment to ecology when you scale it up looking at both the water that's wasted in producing meat and the water that's be fouled the water that's polluted by unimaginable millions of tons of poo from pigs cows and what-have-you flowing downstream when you know that you're doing harm and you know that that harm is unnecessary can you really enjoy eating meat the same way can you really enjoy making love to someone if you know that you're causing them harm if you know that you're causing them fear if you know that it's something they're gonna suffer reflecting on or remembering later I think the truth is some people can and some people can't and most people simply make a choice they can swing either way life is short I'm trying to enjoy my life enjoying my life because I never know what is actually going to end for the other side I don't know if even a single meat eater is gonna watch this video almost all my audience is already vegan if you won't understand it from our perspective please do think for a minute about how you would feel if you were living in a society where some people some are cannibals I'm not so far removed from that situation myself we do have some ethnic groups in northern Myanmar who continued to engage in cannibalism right through the 20th century and I have read accounts of that from people who lived amongst those ethnic groups and some of those ethnic groups are living right here where I am I live in de Hong right on the border between China and northern Myanmar we have another ethnic group here who are quite quite easy to find quite populous here in the town where I'm living who were famous as headhunters specifically for decapitating people and putting lines of skulls lines of human heads on the the path leading up to their villages and their villages were always set up as a fortress so you would have to walk up a path with decapitated heads on both sides of you before you approach the the wooden gate to enter one of their towns now obviously in the last few decades that's disappeared but I remember I read one count from the 1980s and 1990s of still some of those tribal groups engaging in cannibalism you know if you live around other people who are cannibals they will have in a meaningful sense an appeal to tradition to justify their behavior a lot of people including vegan gains you say oh this is an appeal to tradition fallacy well they may really feel that it is very very meaningful for them to continue the traditions of their ancestors that involved killing and eating human beings but it's also something where they recognize it as wrong they have to recognize themselves as being implicated in a crime and all their ancestors going back a thousand years as having done something as having done something that was both evil and unnecessary but if you ask me do I feel morally superior to someone who eats meat when I live in a society where we all have to share the same plates well how would you feel if you were living in a city where some of the people around you some engaged in cannibalism and where some of them told you this is how my ancestors lived this is very important to me in my culture and has been for thousands of years and you know what hey 23 hours a day or 28 days of the month they live like a normal person they live like you and me why would you hesitate to say no there's an important ethical difference between you and me even if we're co-workers even if we're friends even we get along on so many other issues there's an important ethical difference because I'm willing to recognize that what you do when you kill and eat another human being isn't just evil it's an unnecessary evil and the fact that you may enjoy it the fact that it may be pleasant the fact that your ancestors did it the fact that it's deeply meaningful to your religion or your cultural tradition that's not good enough that's not good enough for me and for that same reason I don't accept that life is about pleasure I don't accept the basic premise of this woman's philosophy so it's not surprising that I disagree with her about everything else I also don't think that we need to live our lives in pursuit of optimal morality we don't have to run around volunteering to help injured people in every war in every refugee crisis every time you see a beggar on the street you don't have to try to help but I do think there's a minimum standard of doing the best you can and when you know that something in your own life is not merely evil but an unnecessary evil there is an obligation on all of us to eliminate [Music]