Peter Singer: evaluation

Transcript context

…But say you’re trying to compare human animal welfare to nonhuman animal welfare. We have a sense many of these other animals are sentient. That’s pretty much certain. They feel pain, but we don’t know how to compare them to us. We don’t really know even where in science to look for such a unit of comparison. How do we know they don’t just overwhelm our well-being Derek Parfit-like conclusions? Doesn’t one just become a radical agnostic if all of our judgments rely on this utility thing? Which, to me, is somewhat mysterious. I don’t think you have to be completely agnostic about all these issues. I think there are some cases — and again, I would instance factory farming — where we can be very confident that what we’re doing is causing more pain and suffering than it’s doing good to us. That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of other questions, including that question you asked about — is it good that humans colonized North America — where it’s harder to make those decisions because they are involving comparisons. Some of these decisions are quite practical, too. For example, even within the animal movement, if you say, should we focus on trying to get people not to eat chicken? Because chickens are so intensively farmed, and there’s so many of them, it takes less of a chicken to make a meal than it does of a cow. Should we do that? Then we’re trying to compare the suffering of more chickens with fewer cows or fewer pigs. I agree those questions are still ones that we can’t really get a grip on, but it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do that is based on sentience, happiness, suffering, and so on. If there are many intelligent and sentient space aliens, would that make the extinction of the human race less of a tragedy?…

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