Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, yeah. But setting aside the meat thing, it seems like there’s two questions here. One thing would be that, yes, we want to eat meat, and we’ll be eating meat in some form regardless. But nonetheless, we might think, “Oh, it’s terrible that all these animals in the wild are suffering. They’re dying because of parasites. They have these horrible diseases, or they’re starving to death.” So we might take some action if we’re incredibly wealthy to improve their welfare. I don’t think we will. We engineer nature somewhat right now: We manage deer populations. You might keep coyotes out of a national park. As we get richer, we’ll do more of it, but again, I think we’re largely indifferent to what I’m calling nature. Maybe the fundamental, and indeed, insoluble problem of philosophy is how to integrate the claims of nature with the claims of culture. They’re such separate spheres, but they interact all the time. The final appendix B of my book, I talk about this problem. How do you weight the interests of humans versus animals or creatures that have very little to do with human beings. And I think there’s no answer to that. The moral arguments of Stubborn Attachments — they’re all within a cone of sustainable growth for some set of beings. And comparing across beings, I don’t think anyone has good moral theories for that. But it seems like on your view, you should think that, while we don’t know what the correct moral trade-off is between humans and animals, there is a correct moral trade-off. It’s just very hard to figure out what it is.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.