Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…Say more. I don’t buy that the morality here is so complex. I am not saying that there aren’t better and worse things that we do, and I’m not saying that there’s any world in which we’re not going to be running over field mice as we plow fields. But we are torturing animals right now. I don’t mean to get too much on the horse here, but what we do to egg-laying chickens, it’s just fucking crazy. Not only is it fucking crazy, but we know it is because it is illegal now to tape it. [laughs] And it is so grotesque to watch it. I think that we can do better than that. There are a lot of places in life, and in living a moral life — environmentalism is a big one of these — where, given how complex human actions are, it is very hard to know with certainty that you’re making the right decisions. That’s true constantly in politics. That’s true constantly in everything we do. Nevertheless, we somehow stumble forward and try to do the best we can. Eating more plants and keeping fewer animals in conditions so terrible that we can’t actually bear to watch them and have had to pass laws so people stop trying to make us see them, I think that lends a fair bet. Last question, cheerier. You’ve traveled to a bunch of different countries, a lot of different parts of the United States. What’s the one thing you know about travel that you feel other people underrate as a way to do it?…

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