The Omnivore’s Deception

The meat industry and its defenders promise ethical consumption and sustainable farming, but animal agriculture fuels ecological destruction, entrenches human supremacy, and masks cruelty with comforting myths. John Sanbonmatsu, philosopher and author of The Omnivore’s Deception, shatters the myths of “humane meat” and the 'naturalness' of eating meat, and explains why abolishing the animal economy is essential to living an ethical human life. Highlights include:

• Why growing up as the child of a Jewish mother and Japanese-American father in the U.S. sensitized John to bullying and injustice - against both human and nonhuman animals;

• Why the origins of human domination over animals are rooted in patriarchy and an ancient human estrangement from animals, and reinforced today by a toxic nexus of masculinity, human supremacy, neoliberal capitalism, and pronatalism;

• Why focusing only on factory farming misses the fundamental problem of human domination of animals and the planet - and how books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the new American pastoral ethos perpetuate myths of so-called ethical meat while attacking the animal rights movement;

• Why justifying meat-eating as “natural” is ethically bankrupt - on par with past appeals to nature to justify slavery or denying women’s rights - and how vegans and vegetarians provoke defensive ridicule because they reveal uncomfortable truths;

• Why the flood of scientific studies on animal cognition and emotion hasn’t changed behavior - and how cultural fascination with AI and plant consciousness distracts from our brutal treatment of fully sentient animals;

• Why bad faith - our self-deception about how we treat animals - is the most destructive force preventing moral progress, and why what we’re doing to animals deserves to be called 'evil';

• How empathy, an evolved trait we share with animals and desperately need to nurture, is being eroded by increasing social disconnection and anti-empathy tech bro ideologies;

• Why lab meat, also known as 'clean meat', is not the solution to speciesism and human supremacism and consuming our way to animal liberation is a delusion;

• Why the animal rights movement is being undermined by the money pouring into utilitarian effective altruism and “realistic” approaches - when true compassion demands not animal welfarism, but the abolition of animal exploitation and a direct challenge to the entrenched power structures that prevent moral progress.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• John Sanbonmatsu

• Book: The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves by John Sanbonmatsu

• Website: Clean Meat Hoax

• Episode: Highway to Hell - The Dystopian Fantasies of Tech Billionaires with Émile P. Torres

• Testimonials

• Share Your Thoughts With Us

• Support this Podcast

• Subscribe to our Newsletter

• TRANSCRIPT

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:00:00):

  The fact that we are omnivores simply means that our bodies have evolved in such a way that we can metabolize animal flesh, and we can also metabolize legumes and fruits and vegetables, and we can also metabolize human flesh for that matter, right? Cannibalism has been practiced for thousands of years in multiple cultures. That isn't an argument for cannibalism, nor can the constitution of our bodies over time be said to be an argument for committing injustices against other animals. It's another form of what I call in my book, bad faith, which is meant to get us off the hook and not have to confront the reality of the radical evil that we inflict on other animals. And it is evil. What we do to animals is as evil as any other thing that humans have done to one another over the centuries. It’s as evil as genocide. It's as evil as slavery. We don't even have a word for what we do to other animals because the scale of what we do, the horror of what we do, and the universally accepted nature of what we do, there's no word adequate to describe this system.

  Alan Ware (00:01:00):

  That was writer, philosopher, and cultural critic, John Sanbonmatsu. We'll be speaking with John about his forthcoming book, The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong About Meat, Animals and Ourselves in this episode of OVERSHOOT.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:01:24):

  Welcome to OVERSHOOT, where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by human's, excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.

  Alan Ware (00:01:50):

  I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics, we examine the forces underlying overshoot, the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest.

  John Sanbonmatsu is associate professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he teaches courses on ethics, political philosophy, existentialism, philosophy of film and other topics. He's author of the forthcoming book, The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong About Meat, Animals, and Ourselves, editor of the book, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, and author of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy and The Making of a New Political Subject. A critic of cellular or cultivated meat technology, he is also creator and curator of the website, cleanmeat-hoax.com. His opinion writing has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, Detroit Free Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Huffington Post among other places. And now on to today's interview.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:03:22):

  Hi and welcome to OVERSHOOT, John. Thank you so much for joining us today.

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:03:27):

  I'm just thrilled to be here and to have this opportunity to talk about what's going on with you.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:03:32):

  Yes, likewise. And we've had several conversations over the last year since I first discovered your work criticizing the movement behind clean meat, also known as lab grown meat or cultured meat. And it has been a delight getting to know you and dig into your incredible work. And Alan and I have been deeply impressed by the depth of your scholarly work and your personal commitment to a politics of universal liberation, both for exploited humans and exploited animals. And we also appreciate that your work critiques the radical relativism of postmodernism as well as the combined oppressive forces of patriarchy and human supremacy, which overlaps so strongly with our own work. So very, very excited to have you, John, and so good to dig deeper into this with you today.

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:04:27):

  Well, your audience will probably grimace at this mutual admiration society, but I'm just delighted by the work that you and Alan and others in your organization are doing because I've felt for a very long time that the question of human population growth is just, it's like the third rail of left politics. No one wants to touch it. And part of that is just the fear of the issue, but then it's just a complete incomprehension of the way human activity is changing the planet and making life impossible for all the other beings of the Earth. So especially now with all this pronatalist stuff going on, I'm just a great admirer of Population Balance's work.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:05:03):

  Thanks so much for saying that. So we'd like to begin with a personal question. Throughout your career you focused on understanding the root causes of oppression of both people and animals, and you've worked to end those oppressions. Can you describe the personal journey that led you to these commitments?

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:05:24):

  Well, when I think back, it really comes down to my childhood, I guess, and my experiences. Then both of my parents came from backgrounds that were in some way connected to intergenerational trauma. Now my mother's Jewish and at the time that she of course was growing up, antisemitism was simply a fact of life in America and quite pervasive. And then my father, who is Japanese American, he was born in California, never actually visited Japan, but he and his family were interned in a Japanese American internment camp in World War II in Poston, Arizona. So I was raised with strong ethical values of respecting others and so on. But I think also my identity as a kind of racial outsider. I grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, which is we called America's hometown at the time. That's where the pilgrims landed, overwhelmingly white and at that time extremely racist.

  (00:06:24):

  So I encountered a lot of racial bullying from the time I was just even a toddler all the way up through college. So those experiences really sensitized me to injustices against others. It wasn't just that I felt that I and my family, my sisters were being mistreated or subjected to racial taunts. It's that I would see disabled kids being bullied or kids being beaten up for being gay or whatnot, racism towards other groups. So I developed at an early age that sensitivity. And also in terms of my later work on animals, I was raised to see cats and dogs who are members of our household as beings worthy of our respect and love. And that was of course, contradictory because we continued to participate in the animal economy, you know eating animals. But nonetheless, I think that experience also was really important because later when I began to learn about how we treat animals in the food system, it really shocked me and upset me. Still does.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:07:24):

  Well, thanks for providing that background. And I think as would so many others who have woken up to these overlapping systems of oppressions, whether through personal experiences of trauma and oppression or through that of others that we are close to or that we love, whether they are other humans or nonhumans. For so many of us, it's these personal awakenings that then animate the work that we end up doing. Really grateful that you took that path because not everybody takes that epiphany and turns it into something that you have.

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:08:01):

  Thank you. I mean, there are a lot of people, of course doing animal advocacy work. And in a way it's the hardest form of social justice work because the way we treat other animals, the injustices are so vast and they're accepted and supported by the vast majority of people. So it takes a certain kind of moral commitment to see that through, particularly if you're an empathetic person. And I should have said that - that those early experiences of mine really helped me to empathize with others, including nonhuman animals. And if you have that kind of empathetic sensitivity, then when you learn about what we actually do to billions and even trillions of our fellow beings, it's really unbearable. And a lot of people in the movement are either in therapy or whatever, having a hard time coping simply with the knowledge of what we do. And it's true that most people don't want to know. Most people don't want to go down that path. And although that's understandable, it's simply the case that ethically we have a responsibility towards others, particularly those who are most vulnerable in our midst, who in fact are nonhumans.

  Alan Ware (00:09:08):

  Today we'll mainly be discussing your upcoming book, The Omnivore's Deception, and you make a powerful case in the book for abolishing all forms of exploitation of nonhuman animals. And what do you think are some of the ultimate origins of humanity's beliefs that allow for such a wide scale destruction and suffering of animal life?

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:09:30):

  That's such a good question then. It's kind of like asking in a way, why do we still have patriarchy? Why is it men still dominate women in every sphere of society and universally and in a way, there's no good answer. We just know that it's a problem and we need to overcome it. We started out obviously as we were a small tree-dwelling mammal with a tail, probably a scavenger many, many millions of years ago before we evolved into eventually our early ancestors, the hominids. So we are still a primate, but at some point, and we can only speculate right about what happened, but our capacity for language really gave us the ability to abstract from immediate context and to imagine all sorts of things, you know to imagine gods, to imagine myths. If you look at the early cave drawings, not only drawn by our own species but other hominid species, we were not the only species that used representation.

  (00:10:28):

  But once you have that capacity for representation, you can draw a picture of a bison or a saber-toothed tiger. Then you have this reflexive consciousness and that's wonderful and powerful and dangerous, and it can lead to a kind of alienation or estrangement from other beings. So in a certain sense, you can tame nature with your mind. This is a point by the way that the chorus in the Sophocles play, Antigone, make - that the human mind is able to tame everything except for death. And of course now the techno bros are trying to overcome that. But our domination of animals is rooted in patriarchy. I mentioned patriarchal forms of society, and traditionally men had a monopoly on the means of violence, which they deployed against other humans, women, and nonhuman animals. Over time and over the centuries, we've become more and more estranged or alienated from our natural relations and from other animals.

  (00:11:26):

  And then five centuries ago, of course, with the birth of capitalism, early modern capitalist relations in Europe, you have a whole different order of violence against animals and a stripping away of the kind of special status that nonhumans had in the sense of being either divinely created or of having their own spark of energy and spirit. And now they're represented under capitalist relations as a mirror of commodities and as machine-like objects, which we can trace back to the thought of Rene Descartes and the early experimentalist Francis Bacon. So that's the world we now live in where we see other animals as things, simply things to be manipulated and disposed of.

  Alan Ware (00:12:05):

  Right. And now that system of industrial animal agriculture and aquaculture, I've heard you talk about, being one of the most pervasive global systems of animal exploitation under these capitalist commodity logics producing animal products at scale for 8 billion plus people on the planet. And what do you think are some of the practical ethical consequences if humanity continues down that path of collective indifference to the suffering of tens, hundreds of billions, trillions of animals when fishes are included?

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:12:37):

  Well, the system that we now have is contraindicated with planetary survival, at least for most species, including homo sapiens. People don't realize that this industrialized animal agriculture and fishing system is together they form the most destructive ecological force on the planet. And one thing that's quite upsetting to me is that we find a narrowing of public discourse and conversations about the ecological crisis reduced to global warming and then is further reduced to the fossil fuel industry. Well, in fact, if you take the whole transportation sector - cars, trucks, planes, ships and so forth - all those carbon emissions are actually less than the emissions produced in animal agriculture to say nothing of plastics in the seas due to discarded fishing gear, nets and lines and so forth. Not to mention destruction of topsoil to agriculture, algae blooms that developed because of washing out of fertilizer into the seas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

  (00:13:38):

  And then looming overall, that is mass extinction, right? We're in the worst extinction crisis in over 65 million years, and that isn't only because of global warming. That was already underway before the atmosphere began warming up. And so all of that is due to this conjuncture of these two vast systems -capitalism on the one hand and what critics call speciesism or human supremacism on the other. And that system of human supremacism, of course it comes before capitalist development by thousands of years. And that's a weakness I think in ecological Marxist theory, sort of like capitalism is the origin of the problem, and it isn't. We have been dominating and killing elms for a very long time. And that's why I also think to talk only about industrialized animal food production is a mistake because the underlying problem is a relation of domination, a relation of mass violence between our species and all the other species. So there's a kind of denialism going on here - both about the extent of the emergency that we're in, the ecological emergency, and a complete miscomprehension of what the origins of the problem are. And it isn't just the fossil fuel industry. It's these deep seated structures of violence and oppression, and this industrialized system it's just the most obvious manifestation of these dynamics. You can't possibly feed eight to ten billion humans as the human population is protected to climb even further without causing enormous violence and suffering to other beings. There's just no way to do it.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:15:11):

  Yeah. And your book is titled The Omnivore's Deception, and the title is a clever play on the title of Michael Pollan's 2006 book called The Omnivore's Dilemma. And we'd like to start with the first word in that title, “omnivore.” As you just mentioned, sometimes even among environmentalists and progressives, the act of eating animals can be reduced to a problem with factory farming. If only we could abolish that problem, then animal agriculture in smaller farms could be justified because it's seen as natural that an omnivore such as human beings should eat animals and their products. And you point out that this invocation of human omnivory to justify eating animals is a naturalistic fallacy. Could you unpack that for us?

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:16:03):

  Yeah, this is super important and this is why I go over to the introduction to my book. And if you think about the discourse of factory farming, well, why does anyone even talk about that? It's because the animal rights movement, animal advocates have made that into an issue over the decades, and that's a success that people at least are dimly aware that we don't treat animals well. Now, in my experience teaching hundreds and hundreds of undergraduates, people don't actually know how we treat animals. I would say one in a hundred do, they have any sense, have you know seen basically atrocity videos of animals being raised for slaughter and killed as they scream, and it's so beyond our imaginings. So that success though of focusing public attention on factory farming has come at the expense of a deeper understanding and a more mature understanding of what the problem really is.

  (00:16:56):

  There have been critics of our violence towards animals or killing and eating of animals for literally 3000 years. You can go back to Pythagoras, to Jainism and early Buddhists who are against this and saw this as a form of barbarism. Leonardo da Vinci also in his notebooks talks about our barbarism towards animals, and evidence suggests he was an ethical vegetarian. So that's the first thing. It's important to understand that this problem of human cruelty towards animals, it's been talked about for literally thousands of years, whereas what we call factory farming or industrialized animal agriculture only gets underway really in the 20th century. So you mentioned Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and in fact, yes, my book's title The Omnivore's Deception is a play on Pollan's title. Now, by the time that Pollan wrote that book in 2006, there was already a kind of confluence of factors that had come together, institutional forces, cultural forces to rally around and defend the meat economy, which had come under crisis.

  (00:17:55):

  There were health problems associated with the meat industry, animal industry. People were getting sick and dying of e coli and salmonella and so forth. Doctors and nutritionists had shown that a vegetarian or vegan diet, that both were better for you on average than an animal-based one. This is in the seventies, eighties, nineties. And it was also clear that the animal system is ecologically ruinous for the Earth, a living Earth. So the meat industry was increasingly on the defensive and at the same time a minority of consumers, but a significant minority had begun experimenting with vegetarianism back in the seventies period that came out of the counterculture. Francis Moore Lappe's book, Diet for a Small Planet, came out in the early 1970s and sold eventually over two and a half million copies. So there were all these pressures to rethink the premises of the meat economy. But then there was this backlash, right?

  (00:18:48):

  And it was part of a larger, I think political and cultural backlash began with Reaganism in the 1980s and neoliberal economics, and so a reassertion of the right to eat meat and so on. Anyway, Michael Pollan comes around and he writes this book that is on the one hand, very critical of corporate industrialized agriculture, and at the same time, it is a pointed defense of meat eating, of killing animals. It's an attack on animal rights. The author literally killed animals with his bare hands in the course of researching his book just so he could write about it. So he goes to Joel Salatin's farm in Virginia and personally kills dozens of chickens, and he goes into the woods in California with a hunting rifle and kills a mother pig while these pigs and their piglets are foraging peacefully. That book brought together under one roof, this kind of mythology, a romance of what I call a new American pastoral ethos - that we could get in touch with the land and have authentic relations with animals and with our food and with our neighbors by buying locally raised pork and chickens and so on.

  (00:19:55):

  And that book continues to exert an enormous cultural influence to this day. It's part of the state-mandated curriculum in middle schools and high schools across the US. So it's a new generation every few years of young people into this idea that we can have our meat and our conscience too. Everybody can be against factory farming and at the same time, dream of a good animal, agriculture, good meat, where animals are raised 'respectfully, humanely, sustainably, killed with compassion.' So it's a win-win for everybody. And so my book is really an attempt to deconstruct these myths. Pollan is just one, he's the most influential figure, but there are just thousands of other people, including prominent figures like Barbara Kingsolver, the author whose book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was almost as influential, that came out the following year, 2007. Temple Grandin, who claims that her autism gives her special insight into the experiences of nonhuman animals and who has spent her whole career developing ways to kill animals without them being upset about it.

  (00:21:01):

  So the problem is that all of this works as a kind of legitimation mechanism, that is to say, we know that the meat economy is destroying life on Earth. We know that it's horribly, viciously cruel to the animals trapped within it. We know that animal-based diets are actually inferior. They produce inferior health outcomes for humans, et cetera. And yet all these forces are trying to stabilize, legitimate the system. And the word you used is naturalism. It's like we are biologically omnivores, therefore we are entitled to eat other animals and we should eat other animals. That's the argument. The fact that we are omnivores simply means that our bodies have evolved in such a way that we can metabolize animal flesh and we can also metabolize legumes and fruits and vegetables, and we can also metabolize human flesh for that matter, right? Cannibalism has been practiced for thousands of years in multiple cultures, because we can also metabolize human flesh. That isn't an argument for cannibalism, nor can the constitution of our bodies over time be said to be an argument for committing injustices against other animals.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:22:09):

  Yeah, and you've argued in your book that omnivorism is not a license to kill. It's rather an invitation to improve our moral characters, to act in accordance with our better natures. So how do you further peel back the arguments around this naturalistic fallacy of just because we've done it for so long, therefore it must be part of naturally who we are?

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:22:36):

  Yeah, I mean, I teach ethics to college students, and one of the most poisonous things that we find in ethics are appeals to nature to justify injustices, right? Well, women shouldn't have the right to vote because it's not natural. Women are just intellectually inferior to men. They're not capable of making intelligent decisions, et cetera. That was a justification for depriving women of suffrage. So when you begin to talk about inferiority based on biology or you begin to talk about certain forms of violent domination as quote natural, what you try to do when you bring up those kinds of arguments is short circuit moral reasoning because it's kind of, it's a fait accompli. Well, it's simply natural to do, and this is particularly true of the animal issue, but as I say, it's also been used to justify all sorts of things. Slavery was seen to be natural and right for thousands of years. 

  (00:23:29):

  Aristotle in his Politics writes extensively in defense of slavery. It's just part of the natural order. And in fact, that Aristotelian conception of the great chain of being where some beings are superior and are meant to dominate and make use of, to exploit other inferior, weaker beings, that is the basis of our continuing domination of other animals. And it's still the basis of a lot of conservative thought, actually. There's an implicit sense from Trump on down that white people are better than other people and ought to be in control and have power. And this is the naturalistic fallacy right, or form of it. Even if something is natural, even if it was natural for us to eat animals that wouldn't make it right in itself for the same reason that bubonic plague is natural. Aggression maybe in the human personality's natural, but should we go around encouraging aggression towards other people? 

  (00:24:23):

  Should we be spreading bubonic plague or is it wrong to intervene against a virus because after all, it's natural for us to get viruses. So it's just a kind of silly argument to be honest. You have to be able to give reasons for your values and for the kinds of actions that you're advocating. And you can't just say, oh, it's natural. It's a cultural practice. It's not a metaphysics. So because it's a cultural practice, what we do to animals, we can change it. That is within our agency. The problem is because we don't want to change our behavior, we reach for these facile fallacious arguments to ward off any critique that might upset us or destabilize our sense of identity. And so this is why you see vegans and vegetarians ridiculed at every possible opportunity. Now, let's keep in mind here that there actually aren't vegans literally taking meat off of the forks of meat eaters, and yet even to say, Well I'm a vegan, is seen as this huge threat, becomes a psychological threat that has to be defended against. And there's actually some literature about this, how the cognitive dissonance that we have or people have on the one hand eating animals and on the other hand, thinking that they respect and love animals, that conflict is not one that people are willing to confront.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:25:37):

  Right? The same parallel can be drawn to the naturalness of the gender roles that emerged with patriarchy and naturalness being in quotes. And that capacity for women to reproduce has often been used as a tool of oppression toward them. All women, just because they can, must and should want to reproduce. And as you said earlier in the interview, a lot of the pronatalist claims coming out of these nationalistic authoritarian rhetoric are using that fallacy to say, people want way more children than they're actually having. Let's help them do that. And in the same way that just being vegan confronts the very structure of human supremacy, the very act of a person choosing not to have kids confronts that patriarchal structure, and people without children are often attacked. There's all sorts of names for them to kind of bring them back into line. whether it's JD Vance, calling people childless cat ladies or Elon Musk saying people without children don't have a stake in the future and therefore should not be allowed to vote. It's all a way to put people back into their quote, the right place, what they're naturally supposed to be doing.

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:27:01):

  Absolutely. And as you know, there's an intersection of these issues, right? The right wing, the same people who are pronatalist, they identify with the carnivore diet, and they're against empathy as a mode of knowing the world or of knowing others. Elon Musk's called empathy the greatest threat to the West. So this return, as you describe it to traditional gender roles and women as kind of breeders for the state, it's not a coincidence that we're seeing this reaction against feminism and this muscular, fascist reassertion of traditional gender roles. At the same time, we're seeing a resurgence of meat culture. It's all tied in together with a kind of masculine supremacy that, as you say, tries to keep so-called natural others in their rightful place as the political right sees it. Now, what's disappointing of course, is that the political left doesn't understand these issues as well as it ought to.

  (00:27:54):

  I mean, you have leftists, as you've shown in your work who refuse to talk about human population growth or who are actually pronatalist. And at the same time, you see most of the left completely hostile to any consideration of animal suffering, animal rights, human supremacism. So it isn't just a left right thing, but I do want to underscore that ideologically speaking, the coherence is really on the right, the ideological coherence where we see this nexus of toxic masculinity, domination over nature and animals, the neoliberal free market, and now this insane pronatalism we see everywhere. That's where it's the most potent, although it's not limited to the right. Let me give you another example in the same vein. On Blue Sky the other day, I had posted something announcing my new book and a Blue Sky follower, whatever, who is a self-described anarchist, wrote in response, the only thing I hate worse than maggots, meaning MAGA supporters, are vegans telling me what to eat or what not to eat.

  (00:28:56):

  And I found it kind of funny because here's this self-described leftist, an anarchist who's taking this neoliberal libertarian discourse of freedom of consumer choice, completely unwittingly reproducing that set of assumptions about the world - that my choice to appropriate the bodies of animals comes before ethical considerations or political considerations. But this is a problem with the left generally, I just want to say, is that there's always been an incapacity, an unwillingness on the part of leftists to criticize themselves or to think critically and strategically about their own movements and their movements' weaknesses, and to consider the articulation between leftist forms of thought and action and the broader mechanisms which we are not immune to. 

  Alan Ware (00:29:46):

  Yeah, the left and the right are susceptible to the deception that's in the second word of your title, The Omnivore's Deception, and a major part of that that both the left and right also have are beliefs that support human supremacy in general. But as you share in the book at length, and we've learned from guests like Carl Safina and Mark Bekoff, there's this ever-increasing amount of research in recent years revealing how enormously complex animals' lives are - cognitively, emotionally, even culturally, that Carl Safina talks about. What do you wish more people knew about the cognitive, emotional, cultural complexity that might increase people's sensitivity to animal suffering?

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:30:27):

  Thanks for that question, Alan. I have a chapter called Animal Not Vegetable in my book, and the reason I call it that, animal not vegetable, is in reference to Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is about her family's year spent raising animals for slaughter on an organic farm. And at various points Kingsolver essentially conflates nonhuman animals with plants, bacteria, and so forth. So if you're a vegetarian or animal advocate who opposes the killing of animals, well, that's like opposing the beheading of lettuces. If you cut the head off an animal that's just like harvesting lettuces, she literally says that in her book. And this was a hugely influential book, still read by millions of people, and no one has ever criticized her for those statements ever that I've been able to find. So you have this kind of pervasive mentality of other animals as either automatons, as I said, machines or simply our gross inferiors.

  (00:31:24):

  And tied to that notion of inferiority is what I call species right, by which I mean to say it's not just these other beings are seen as inferior. We take it to be implicit in their very inferiority that they were meant to be here, to serve our purposes, that we have a right to their bodies. We have a right to violate them, cage them, kill them, experiment on them again, called human species right. And that right in turn derives from this ancient conception, theological conceptions, metaphysical, cosmogenic conceptions of humans place on the planet and our role in nature and the sense that it's all natural. Now, think about this. I would argue that even our genetic engineering of animals to serve our purposes in the popular imaginary is seen as natural. Well, how can messing with an animal's genome to turn them into a commodity or a pharmaceutical factory so that their body excretes pharmaceuticals, how can that be seen as natural?

  (00:32:22):

  Well, because humans are naturally predators like anyone else on the planet. And so whatever we do must be right. Now, Alan, you asked about all of this fascinating ethological research that's come out about nonhuman consciousness, the incredibly sophisticated cognition, emotionalized depth of feeling that we find in other animals. The late Frans de Waal, the primatologist, wrote a lot about this subject, and he denied that there's a linear scale of cognition whereby you can say, well, humans are at the apex and then everyone's underneath. It's simply not the case. Even insects, invertebrates are getting a second look. We know, for example, that octopuses are extremely intelligent and present, and I think it's very strange to me that in spite of this raft of ethological evidence that we've seen in recent decades, just amazing stuff on empathy in pigs and intelligence in chickens and so forth, it's not making any dents that I've been able to discern in the way we actually treat animals.

  (00:33:26):

  People love these kinds of things. The New York Times is always having articles on some amazing discovery that shows that animals aren't as stupid as we assumed. That's always the set point. Oh, animals are just seen as stupid, low, inferior, crude beings. And then when it turns out that they exhibit empathy or that they can do sophisticated problem solving, everyone is astonished that that happens. Now, I had a friend who watched the Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher, which is about this diver's relationship with this wild octopus that he befriends. And because of that, she won't eat octopuses anymore, but she continues to eat every other living creature that she can get her hands on. So somehow there's a disconnect. I think that it's important to understand that the way the media and popular culture deal with questions of cognition is to reproduce what is really a social hierarchy in our own civilization of those who matter, and those who don't matter.

  (00:34:22):

  Rich people matter. Northern white people matter. People in the third world don't matter. And similarly, well, octopuses now are supposed to matter because they're “smart” like us. It's a fraudulent depiction of the biotic world, of the organisms in the world. So I think that people who've, for example, have grown up with cats and dogs understand that they're individuals. And I spend a lot of time in my book talking about the individuality of animals, and it's not just cats and dogs, it's all animals. Even insects, believe it or not, within the same species exhibit personal tastes, temperaments. Some dragonflies may be very cautious or antisocial and others very gregarious and take risks. So we see personality variance across species and within species. So I guess what I would say is this, it doesn't even in a way matter how much data is amassed unless we chip away at the fundamental ideology and then the ideology's merely in a sense the excrescence of the structural relations, the power and economic relations that reinforce human supremacism.

  (00:35:30):

  We're seeing this cultural fascination with AI and plant consciousness, and I think both of those are very disturbing developments. I think that the emerging research on plants is fascinating, but there still is no evidence that plants actually experience their worlds in a first person subjective, conscious sense. And there's no evidence whatsoever that a machine will ever achieve consciousness and ever have feelings. Literally, there's no evidence of that. And yet our culture's obsessed with stories of intelligent robots who are like us and plants as having feelings too and so on. And I have sympathy for that. When I was a boy, I was interested in a book at the time called The Secret Life of Plants, this is in the 1970s, that argued that plants had sentience and provided scientific evidence supposedly for this. And so much was I taken with that, that I did a biology experiment in like seventh grade where I raised carnivorous plants, Venus flytrap plants, and I talked to one set, and then the control group I didn't talk to, and they all died.

  (00:36:31):

  So that showed that I don't know what it showed about consciousness except it showed I did not have a green thumb, I guess. But I don't think it's an accident at all that Harvard just had a big thing on plant sentience or whatever and the researchers at NYU who are writing books on this. And it's an enormous distraction, because we can theorize as much as we like about the possibility of machine consciousness or about the interesting lives of plants, that's fine, except that it's being used to keep us from examining the torture, mass killing, and in fact, genocide that's going on right now everywhere on the Earth against beings that we know have incredibly sophisticated consciousness who we know can experience and do experience trauma. And I don't say that in some figurative way. Psychologists and scientists have studied PTSD in elephants and gorillas and rats and so forth.

  (00:37:26):

  So we know that's going on. That's enough. But this blurring of lines of ontology, that is to say that the blurring of the lines between classes of beings that really are not the same - a machine is just not the same as an animal, and a plant is not the same as an animal. It's another form of what I call in my book bad faith, which is meant to get us off the hook and not have to confront the reality of the radical evil that we inflict on other animals. And it is evil. That's a term by the way, that I think has been missing in a lot of discourse so far about animal rights. And it's a very old fashioned word, evil, but that's what we're talking about. What we do to animals is as evil as any other thing that humans have done to one another over the centuries. It's as evil as genocide. It's as evil as slavery. We don't even have a word for what we do to other animals because the scale of what we do, the horror of what we do and the universally accepted nature of what we do, there's no word adequate to describe this system.

  Alan Ware (00:38:29):

  Right. As you write in the book, that evil, the unwillingness to acknowledge the complexity of other beings is rooted in bad faith, which you just mentioned a term used by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to describe a peculiar kind of lie, which we're both a deceiver and the deceived. We know the truth, but we hide that truth from ourselves. We deny it. We avoid responsibility for our choices and values and our failures. Could you elaborate on the role you see bad faith playing in our treatment of animals?

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:39:01):

  So in a way, there are three forms of deception that I'm going after in the book. The most obvious is simply the mass propaganda of the meat industry, egg industry, dairy industry, fishing industry, this kind of continual need to reinforce the myths of the animal system and to keep us addicted to animal products. I mean, that's just as obvious as turning on the television and seeing some commercial for McDonald's or something. So it's a putting out of sight what Carol Adams calls the absent referent. In other words, it's making us not see what's there. Okay, so that deception's obvious. Another form of deception that I focus on in the book as I've said, is Michael Pollan and Kingsolver and Temple Grandin and all these people who are saying that we can have humane meat. That is a lie, okay? You can't set out to exploit and destroy entire classes of sensitive beings without causing them injustice, period.

  (00:39:51):

  And finally, when I say deception, I mean self-deception, as you say, or what Jean-Paul Sartre called bad faith. I happen to have my book handy, and I wanted to read, if I may, something from the frontispiece where I quote Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, and the narrator of Moby Dick says the following, 'when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way, it was with me. I said nothing and tried to think of nothing'. And that is bad faith. And in Sartre's terms, Sartre was a very important French existentialist intellectual in the post-war period. And Sartre basically asked, well, why do we lie to ourselves? And the reason we lie to ourselves is to avoid responsibility for our freedom. What does that mean?

  (00:40:43):

  It means that we do make choices as a species and as individuals about the values that we want to live by, the kinds of ways of life that we want to affirm. And so every time I say, well, just killing animals is natural, that can mean and does mean when people say it, both that we find the killing of animals in nature. And it also means that part of my nature is simply to kill animals. So I've reduced myself to a supposed natural capacity, which therefore in a certain sense, immobilizes me. Well, it's just part of who I am. I'm just, I'm a killer like everyone else on the planet, and that's an evasion. It's an evasion of my freedom because I can choose differently. I can relate to my fellow beings with nonviolence and love and compassion and respect, or I can relate to them differently.

  (00:41:31):

  I can treat them as objects to be exploited and harmed at my whim. So I think that bad faith, honestly, again, I say this as an ethics professor is the most destructive force on the planet vis-a-vis moral life. I think we do this all the time. By the way, Sartre did not think that we could ever fully escape bad faith. He's just saying we have to be aware of it, and we should strive to be authentic. And that means being honest with ourselves. And the thing about bad faith is it's harder to name and to deal with than simply a lie told to someone else. I could lie to one of you right now and I'd be aware of it, and I'd be doing it to manipulate you or something like that. But if I'm lying to myself, Sartre pointed out, in a way I know I'm doing that. I mean to be the deceiver and the deceived, well, how's that possible?

  (00:42:21):

  Well, Sartre doesn't think it's quite literally possible. I just don't want to acknowledge my lie. And that's why people get so freaked out whenever there's a vegan in the room and they make fun of vegans because again, they don't want to have to confront the fact that they are knowingly, deliberately engaging in something that is wrong, that is in fact evil. Now, that said, there are people like Michael Pollan who don't avoid seeing the violence we do to animals, and in fact willingly participate in it or even seek out opportunities for that. Now, that is also a form of bad faith, but it's also a manifestation of sadism, of the desire, the pleasure in harming others. I want to be clear that that is an important part of this too. It isn't simply ignorance of the facts. It isn't simply avoidance of the hard truths of the suffering we impose on animals.

  (00:43:16):

  There's this other element of a will to domination, will to power that is pervasive throughout our culture in all sorts of ways, but particularly vis-a-vis other animals. And in my book, I have a whole chapter called Murder She Wrote about women in particular who have taken up animal farming, hunting, and other forms of violence against animals as a way of supposedly achieving empowerment and a sense of authenticity. And as I show these folks who refer to the animals they raise often as their own children, and they cuddle them and refer to them as babies and so forth, then they cut off their heads later and treat them with enormous contempt. Well, this kind of disturbing reverse polarity, like where you go from the one thing to the other thing is symptomatic of the culture at large, isn't it? I mean, we think we're a civilized society. America's the leading country of the free world. We hear this. Meanwhile, we're supporting genocide in Gaza as I speak, millions of people including over a million children are being literally starved to death in the name of our foreign policy. So that's the problem is how do you get people to understand these contradictions and be willing to own up to them in a way that causes a kind of personal crisis, a societal crisis of reflection and change? That's the missing ingredient, right? The change.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:44:34):

  And it's interesting with the naturalistic fallacy, the arguments that people use to support things like animal agriculture, exploitation of oppressed, marginalized communities, et cetera, they rely on our capacity to do something. But it's always a very one-sided argument to always justify the bad aspect of what we are capable of doing. Because if we are going to use nature as an argument, why not use it to talk about the capacity that we have to be kind, to be empathetic, to be cooperative? Why are we always only using it to keep the systems of oppression alive? That's the one-sidedness of the argument that makes it another part of the fallacy.

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:45:25):

  Well, yeah, I mean you've answered the question yourself, which is it's precisely to reinvigorate these structures of inequality and power. That's why we do it, or that's why it's done. I mean, this goes back obviously to Darwinism. I mean, as Marx pointed out, Darwin talks about competition in nature using the terms of laissez faire capitalist economists, political economists of his generation, but even to Darwin's credit, he also understood that there was mutual dependence and cooperation, and those themes were developed by Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist in his book Mutual Aid, where he draws on numerous examples from nature of other species coming to each other's aid and developing strategies of cooperation and so forth. It's not an accident that the survival of the fittest is the dominant narrative to this day in our culture, really, because it coincides with the needs and the ideologies of capital.

  (00:46:27):

  So yeah, we could be choosing to highlight other forms of our natures, and that is what we're talking about doing. Yes, we have to acknowledge humans have capacity for aggression and evil, sadism, as I was saying. But we can choose and must choose to not follow those capacities or develop those capacities. We can enlarge ourselves emotionally and develop a kind of maturity as a species where we simply decide we're now going to relate to the other beings of the Earth, our neighbors, with kindness, with empathy, and we could use our reason. And humans have this incredible intellectual capacity. We could use that for good. Let me give you one example. The millions, hundreds of millions, billions of animals have been killed on our roadways and the entire transportation system, automobile culture is itself irrational. However, given the fact that it exists at present, one thing that's being done is to mitigate collisions and death of animals in nature is to create these overpasses, these bridges that are disguised as natural, like they plant trees and grasses and things on these bridges so that animals can cross freely.

  (00:47:34):

  Well, that's clever, and that shows the capacity to put ourselves in the shoes or hooves or the feet of other beings where we understand their needs - they have autonomy, they have freedom, they need to get from point A to point B. How can we make that happen for them? Now, that is of course, self-interested because humans end up dying or their properties damaged in these collisions. I'm not saying that we're doing it out of empathy, but there is empathy involved in the sense of really understanding what other beings need and nonviolently intervening to make things easier for them. Well, we could do that across the board, and the most obvious way to do that is to simply to stop reproducing them in order to be killed and eaten. And we also benefit ourselves because we know that animal agriculture is one of the leading sources of pandemics, of new zoonotic diseases.

  (00:48:28):

  So our treatment of other animals, our brutality is actually endangering us. We're approaching a point quickly because of global warming and the misuse of the land for animal agriculture that there's going to be true scarcity. I mean, as you know, there's plenty of food to go around right now. It's artificial scarcity that leads to starvation in the Sudan or wherever - due to war and international division of labor and trade policies. But pretty soon actually, there will be scarcity because we're destroying the means of life, period. All the freshwater is disappearing. Something like 75% of the aquifers, freshwater aquifers in the US have been depleted. American cities are sinking into the ground because of the over-tapping of groundwater, most of that for animal agriculture. So it's a win-win if we simply learn to approach other beings in a spirit of love and cooperation rather than violence and exploitation.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:49:20):

  Yeah, totally agree. I think somewhere in your book you also talk about empathy, not so much just being a feeling as it is a mode of perception and knowing that we have the capacity for a sixth sense that's rooted in our bodies, and that's kind of what you are trying to invoke is a call toward greater empathy where it may not be sufficient in of itself, but it is a necessary condition for us to move toward greater justice and awareness.

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:49:49):

  Yes, and I'll tell you, it's so disturbing to me to see this pushback against empathy. There is a book called Against Empathy. There's this whole celebration of violence and extreme fighting, cage fighting and stuff, these sports that really are based around the opposite of empathy, which is sadism as spectacle. But as you say, yes, empathy is a way of knowing the world. It's a way of knowing others, what others are thinking and feeling. I mean, when my kid was a baby, we could tell, we learned to tell when this little infant is crying because he needs to be fed or his diaper probably needs to be changed, or he is just grumpy. You can feel your way into the subjective experiences of others. Now, not completely, of course. It's very hard to understand the other, whether that's a nonhuman animal or our own spouse, but nonetheless, it's just an incredibly powerful capacity that animals evolved over the course of millions of years.

  (00:50:46):

  And the hubris that humans have is just incredible. We think only we have empathy. And then when scientists say, oh, well actually this other rats have empathy, people are always shocked. It's so absurd because it's clear that other animals have been empathetic, experiencing empathy, concern for others, solidarity for hundreds of millions of years - long before hominids got here. And the capacity to know what others are thinking and feeling is simply necessary for survival. And it's certainly the precondition for sociality. It's necessary for any kind of relation with another, because if you don't have empathy, then basically you have a society of sociopaths and think about that. That's a contradiction in terms. All that is to say, if we want to live in a livable world, a just world, these instrumentalizing ways of knowing the other have to be vanquished vis-a-vis other animals and one another - human to human relations.

  Alan Ware (00:51:39):

  And what role did you think the enlightened omnivore ideal has been playing in the broader animal advocacy movement in general?

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:51:49):

  As you may know, there's been a split for decades between the so-called abolitionists and welfarists. The animal welfarists want to alleviate animal suffering in these industries, food industry, by eliminating battery cages for chicken, say, and giving them more space, taking mother pigs out of gestation crates so their piglets aren't nursing through the bars of a cage and this sort of thing. Whereas abolitionists, and I count myself as an abolitionist, want to do away with the underlying relation of domination and the structure of violence. The problem with the welfarist position is that if you're only trying to ameliorate the manifestations of something or the symptoms, you're never going to solve that. I mean, to me, it's the fundamental relation of violence and the fact that we're killing these animals in the billions that leads to their suffering. So if you're not going to eliminate the killing part, then you can't expect these industries ever to respect the autonomy or feelings of the beings that we exploit.

  (00:52:49):

  It's simply ridiculous to think otherwise. Now, in that context, the discourse of enlightened omnivorism - the idea that you can have your conscience and your meat too, the idea that we can shift from factory farming to the nice little family run farm out in the bucolic countryside - is ludicrous on every possible level. But what it does is it gets the consumer off the hook. Because suppose I care about animals and I hear that industrial animal farms are bad for animals, in the back of my mind, I can think, well, I'm a good person because I prefer those other nice farms, the ones where the animals are treated well, but unfortunately, my kids are hungry and here's a McDonald's, so I'm going to stop and shop here. But in my heart of hearts, I wish I could have ethical meat or contrarily if I'm a wealthier person, middle class person, and I can go to Whole Foods I can buy so-called compassionately raised flesh from pigs and cows or eggs from 'free range chickens', et cetera. 

  (00:53:45):

  When Whole Foods was still run by John Mackey, the union-busting owner, he entered a partnership with the Humane Society and they created the so-called Animal Compassion program or something like that, and they invited in animal farmers to be part of this. And so the irony is here you have the world's largest purveyor of organic animal products, Whole Foods Market, trafficking in the bodies of millions of dead animals and increasing sales of meat and animal products under the rubric and slogan of animal compassion. Well, there've been all these exposes showing that's just all bullshit - the humane hoax as people in the movement call it. But because there are billion dollar interests at stake, and because people really bought into this idea of human supremacism, the enlightened omnivore discourse and myth, people cling to that. They do not want to question it. And that's why I wrote my book, really because I think it's important to confront and for people to see that these arguments and the ways that Pollan and others defend this idea, it's a house of cards. If you just look at any of the premises and you look at the facts of how we actually treat animals, including on these smaller farms, it's a horror show.

  Alan Ware (00:55:11):

  And you wrote in the book about the co-optation of the American Cattlemen's Association diffusing the animal rights, vegan movement by isolating the moral idealist, educating the idealists to become realist and convincing opportunists, which there always are in any large institutions or even small institutional movement, to work directly with industry and benefit their careers. And I thought that was interesting.

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:55:36):

  Yes, thanks for mentioning that. I want to give a shout out to my friend Laura Donna Loy, who's a researcher who's been poking around in the archives of the American Cattlemen Association and so forth. The industry is aware of these threats and has been strategizing for ways to defuse these social movements around animal advocacy. And as you say, there's been this effort to isolate people with moral principle in essence, and to portray them as radicals and irrational zealots. Then on the contrary, to praise and to co-opt the so-called realists and pragmatists. And we see this throughout the effective altruism movement, all this money that's going into welfarist causes and men within the movement who left PETA and left the HSUS and so forth who have been cooperating with industry in some cases, profiting with the meat industry by developing hybrid plant meat products and so forth. And unfortunately, they have the money. It's like the golden Law, golden rule, which is that those who have the gold make the rules. So the discourse gets defined inevitably by those in power, which by the way is a point that Marx and Engels make in The German Ideology 150 years ago, that the ideas of any ruling epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:56:55):

  We had another ecocentric ethicist, Clive Spash, and he's also an ecological and social economist who studied the same phenomenon of the movement snatchers. The similar snatching of the environmental movement started to happen with organizations like The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, NRDC. If you look at the boards of these organizations, they are all filled with mostly financiers. And one of the things we talked about earlier is the commodification of nature, financialization of nature, and that's what's starting to happen with these carbon credits, biodiversity credits, where the one goal that they were set out to do, whether it was animal liberation in the animal advocacy case or nature conservation in those organizations, that's gone. They are completely bedfellows with the capitalists and the elitists who benefit from such framing.

  John Sanbonmatsu (00:57:56):

  Yes, it's incredibly discouraging. And the thing is, I was just reading an article about how so many Americans are not opposed to Trump's deportation policy simply because they don't know about them. This is a problem of reification under capitalism, which is a fragmentation of the means of knowledge and way of knowing the world. And so we have a shattering of a common perspective. So everything you just said is so important, and yet how many Americans will ever hear what you just said? How many people who support the World Wildlife Fund or NRDC have any awareness whatsoever that in the name of this benighted realism, they're selling the planet down the river and they're unwilling to name the real problem. I mean, it's interesting. If you read the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report, they're very clear if you read between the lines, that capitalism is destroying everything on Earth, but they don't use the word capitalism once in their report because it would be too upsetting to their donors and their board and their members.

  (00:58:55):

  So they talk about 'overconsumption', they talk about modes of economic development in which elites control resources and so on. And meanwhile, they themselves depict nature as a commodity. They talk about the bee colony collapse syndrome or whatever in terms of how much economic value is lost through the collapse of a species. So nature is simply reduced to the bottom line of profit and loss. That again, is simply characteristic of the larger structure we're in, which is to say it's so hard to think outside the dominant terms, but ultimately you have to talk about moral as well as political corruption if you're going to take money. And in the course of that, you're going to kind of commit yourself not to make waves, not to name the system as it actually is. Then the game is over. And I hear this a lot in the animal advocacy movement as you do too, which is that grassroots organizers, people run small nonprofits, they're faced with a choice either irrelevance or kind of taking the money and moderating their message so it doesn't alienate the donor class. It's ultimately a dead end. We can see this everywhere.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:00:04):

  Yeah, totally. And we've been talking a bit about effective altruism already, which of course is a branch of the larger umbrella of utilitarian ethics, and you've briefly discussed how this ethic can be used to support the so-called humane killing of animals, and we've dedicated an entire episode to the rise of this disturbing movement of effective altruism, long-termism, transhumanism with a philosopher, Émile Torres. What role do you think this utilitarian perspective has played and is playing in devaluing animal experience and animal lives?

  John Sanbonmatsu (01:00:44):

  Well, as I say in my book, it was stumbling across Peter Singer's book, Animal Liberation, in the 1980s in a bookstore when I was in college, that set me on the path to ethical vegetarianism and eventually veganism, and in a way to this very conversation we're having today. So credit where credit's due. The thing about Peter Singer's book - Singer, of course, is the world's preeminent utilitarian - is that it's simple to understand. There's not much philosophy in it. He basically says, pain bad, pleasure good. Other animals feel pleasure and pain. Therefore, it's arbitrary, capricious not to take their pain and pleasure into account because if you do take their pleasure and pain into account, you take that seriously, then basically almost everything we do to animals is unjustifiable. For example, I might get pleasure out of eating animals. Well, in moral terms, these are apples and oranges, so to speak.

  (01:01:33):

  I can't say that what my pleasure in eating a burger is worth the suffering of the cow. So it's powerful. The utilitarian idea is so powerful because it's so simple. A child can understand it, and there's something to it for sure. Suffering is bad. Happiness is good. Furthermore, utilitarianism is a form of what we call consequentialism. As I say, we want to consider the consequences of our actions. So if I have a pizza and I'm coming home from work and I see three people who are houseless starving, then a utilitarian might decide I have an obligation to give them most of my pizza maybe. And so it can lead to a kind of selflessness to helping others and so on. So there are strengths to that tradition, but it has a lot of problems. There are other social goods and human goods, other values that also should matter other than happiness and suffering.

  (01:02:26):

  For example, justice ought to be a good in itself. Love, loving relationships ought to be a good in itself. Utilitarians, and feminists have criticized them for years about this, have a kind of contempt for empathy and a caring for others. It's just not part of their worldview. And lately, I've come to think of utilitarianism as an ethics for sociopaths. Suppose you don't have any emotions. Suppose you don't really have any natural sympathy to help others. I'm just a disembodied mind and I'm trying to calculate what the right thing to do is. Well, then utilitarianism works really, really well to some extent. It gives me clear guidelines. Okay, I'm thinking of torturing my neighbor, but then I think, well, what would Peter Singer do? Okay, well, the pain I caused my neighbor is greater than whatever pleasure I'm going to get from it. But it's a minimalist kind of, and I think impoverished moral theory, because actually it flies in the face of our deepest moral intuitions.

  (01:03:24):

  And to be sure our intuitions need to be examined. We can't take them at face value. I mean, maybe my deepest intuition that the Aryan race is the superior race, and I'm going to identify with my fellow German Nazi friends, but that it's like a false dilemma to say that either we let feeling in like that to let it just override our thinking, or else we have to go into a sociopathic conception like utilitarianism. No, I mean, philosophers have shown you can have both, actually. You can empathize with other people and also exercise reason. You decide, well, I really feel for this person, say, who committed a murder. I can understand this person was abused from birth and so on. I can see how they got from there to the point where they murdered someone. It doesn't mean that because you empathize with them that you don't think they should be held accountable for their crime.

  (01:04:12):

  So that's where reason kicks in - all that is to say that utilitarianism is the stripped-down version of ethics, and it's insufficient. And particularly vis-a-vis animals Singer himself has defended 'enlightened omnivorism', his words. Even today he can't unequivocally condemn the killing of animals as long as it's done in a humane, painless way. To me, that shows a kind of warped view of a meaningful moral life. And that position, as you may know, has gotten him into trouble with the disabled rights community, right? Because one of his early books was called Should the Baby Live? in which he and his co-author argued for killing or euthanizing disabled infants, both on grounds it would save them and their parents a lot of suffering, but also because it would save resources in society. Well, that is unfortunately the same set of arguments that the Nazis made in the T4 euthanasia program where they killed tens of thousands of disabled children and adults.

  (01:05:09):

  So utilitarianism, we can get some insights from it, but if you go all the way with that, you're in a lot of trouble I think. And the last thing I'll say about utilitarianism is it remains captured within a liberal capitalist framework. And we talked about this with effective altruism. There's no structural or historical analysis of society, economy, culture, ideology, power, social relations. It's a dumb approach. Almost by design it takes away from us any analytic capacity to pierce beneath the veil of appearances that we've all been talking about in this conversation to get at what the problem is. And so the effective altruists in particular, based on Peter Singer's philosophy, they actually think capitalism is great. That's insane. I mean, these people are ignorant and willfully ignorant because they've attached themselves to not so much a philosophy as an ideology. They're ideologues.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:05:59):

  Yeah. And speaking about failing to pierce beneath the veil of human supremacy and capitalism, the double helix that you talk about in your book, a much promoted techno-solution to alleviating animal suffering and death is the so-called clean meat or lab meat. And you are one of the leading critics of the cultivated meat movement, and you're a creator and curator of the website, clean meat hoax.com, which is again how I discovered your work when I arrived at my own independent critique of this movement. What do you think the clean meat movement is getting wrong?

  John Sanbonmatsu (01:06:38):

  Well, it's interesting. I hadn't known actually anything about it until my friend Karen Davis, who died a couple of years ago of cancer, tragically. Karen was an incredible activist who ran United Poultry Concerns, and Karen asked me what I thought about it, so I had to look into it, and I was appalled at what I was finding out about it. Now, the promise of so-called clean meat or cellular meat is that you can synthesize animal flesh in these vats that could replace meat from animals. One reason it's been talked about a lot is because the meat industry has been talking about this so-called protein shortage that we're about to experience because there's huge population growth and there isn't enough land to have these animals to exploit for meat and so forth. So how are we going to meet future demand? That's what really is the question from the capitalist perspective is you've got growing population, therefore, and growing middle class in China and India.

  (01:07:31):

  How do you meet the future demand so you can make more money? So they're talking about a protein portfolio that will include meat from traditional animal agriculture, insects and 'clean meat', cellular meat, and also vegan products. It's all this basket of so-called proteins. Now, there are so many problems with the cellular meat thing that on our website we have 12 different arguments explaining what the problem is. But I think beyond the question of its feasibility, because that is a big question, that there are some good signs to suggest that you just can't produce this much synthesized meat to meet future demand or current demand. I mean, it's just a tiny drop in the bucket of what's, if you build millions of these vats, it takes enormous energy, enormous amounts of steel to do it. But even leaving aside the practical question, what's so problematic is that the people boosting this who are millionaires and billionaires of course, and then wrongheaded people within the animal advocacy movement, is that they're selling this as the solution to the problem of speciesism and human supremacism, and it just isn't.

  (01:08:39):

  First of all, they don't even talk about it in those terms. So there's a mystification of what the problem is, and there's also a deliberate attempt to take 'ethics off the table'. That's a quote from Bruce Friedrich, who is the director of the Good Food Institute, which is a kind of lobbying organization for plant-based foods, but increasingly cellular meat companies. And Friedrich has said this repeatedly that it's a problem when we talk about ethics because it turns people off. So we're not going to talk about what we do to animals. We're going to just show that this product is healthier, it's cleaner, tastier, whatever. Well, that is a losing proposition for a whole slew of reasons. If you're saying to people, first of all, your true essence ontologically is you're a consumer. And as part of that identity, the thing that matters most to you and me and all of us is just your selfish needs.

  (01:09:33):

  So I'm going to show you that by eating this, you're going to be better off. You've lost the issue there because the problem is this structure of violence and inequality between us and other animals. And if you can't name that, why should I as a consumer, why should I even bother to buy cellular meat? Why? Because it's slightly less fat? Basically, actually, synthesized meat has all the problems nutritionally that regular meat has, I mean, it has cholesterol, it has fat and so on. So you're not getting much of a savings there. And even the ecological savings are grossly exaggerated because there's an enormous amount of carbon that has to go in to produce this product. There are all sorts of reasons. If you go to the CleanMeat-Hoax website, you'll find that. At one point, the Good Food Institute had taken out a fake mirror site of our site.

  (01:10:21):

  They called it the same thing, clean meat hoax, that would direct traffic away from our site to their multimillion dollar lobbying group. And it was only when I threatened legal action and to expose them that they reluctantly took it down. But it's so telling that that happened because it just shows how much money is at stake. If you look at the meat industry and the way it talks about cellular meat, it's clear they say this, it's not intended to replace animal agriculture. It's simply another market, another product to colonize. I support vegan products and everything, but for every new vegan product, there are a hundred new animal products. So the consumer vegan who has no critique of capitalism and thinks that, oh, well, we're going to consume our way to animal liberation is deluded. They just don't understand the nature of the system.

  Alan Ware (01:11:13):

  And you've been teaching moral philosophy ethics for 25 years now, and we're just wondering what you've learned in terms of a vision of a more enlightened morality that might allow us to coexist with the rest of life long into the future.

  John Sanbonmatsu (01:11:29):

  Well, there have been really robust moral theories for thousands of years I think, certainly in recent centuries. Utilitarianism has some really strong points. Kantism, if you strip aside its anthropocentrism, has some strong points. Eco- feminism. I talk about Martin Buber's kind of Hasidic conception of love. There's no shortage of good theories about how to behave and how to be good on this planet and how to treat others with respect. Right? I mean, Buddhists have been talking about Ahimsa, compassion for other beings, for thousands of years. Hindus have been talking about these principles. Christianity is a beautiful idea. Love your neighbor. What could be nicer? So what do people do with that? Well, I mean, today, the evangelical Christians are in favor of the death penalty and genocide. So it's an interesting conversation to have, although I don't know how far we could go with it if we spent an afternoon trying to figure out why is it that humans on the one hand have these really nice theories of spiritual traditions, moral theories, but are absolutely unable to get along with each other or with the other beings that we live with.

  (01:12:39):

  And as we all know on this conversation, there are these structures of power like capitalism and patriarchy that get in the way of these and other beautiful sentiments. That's really the problem. And they're so powerful and so entrenched, and that they're so much part of our ordinary experiences. They've percolated down and permeated into our identities, our most intimate aspects of our sensibilities and intellects that we can't see outside this frame. And so we think that it's like, okay, you have to vote either republican or democratic. That's the choice without the larger picture, which is that both parties are bringing us down. That's just one example, right? So in my book, I take what I call a pluralistic approach. I think an empathy-based ethics is crucial, and a feminist ethics is crucial, but having all the best theories in the world, and there's been a lot of wonderful work by professional ethicists for years, it's what does it amount to if the structures in society keep ordinary people chained to false beliefs? 

  (01:13:35):

  And by the way, I say chained for a reason, which is that Plato in the Republic, written 2,500 years ago, has Socrates talk about the cave. And in The Allegory of The Cave, very famously, many kids read it in high school and college, there are all these prisoners chained in a cave to look at a wall, and on the wall are projected shadows from figures behind them. There's a fire that's casting shadows on the wall. So the people in the cave mistake the shadows for the real thing. And very few people get to leave the cave that are able to break free. And the philosopher breaks free. The philosopher climbs out of the cave and sees the bright sun of day and sees the good - the sun represents the good - and is blinded by the light.

  (01:14:26):

  And then the philosopher's eyes adjust to the beauty of reality. And then this is what happens when the philosopher goes back down into the cave to try to liberate the other prisoners. They want to kill him or her. They think they're crazy. What are you talking about? These shadows are the real thing. You are a heretic. And of course, in real life, Socrates was invited to drink from a goblet of poison hemlock because he was pissing people off in ancient Athens by asking too many questions about Athenian society. Well, my friends, nothing has changed in 2,500 years. So you have this wonderful series of podcasts and, oh my God, what could be more important than the questions you're raising? They're existential. They're about not only our survival as a species, but our character as a species. What do we want to see of ourselves? And yet, as you know, a vast majority of people, they're just stuck in a kind of false world where everybody thinks that what is real, it turns out isn't real.

  Alan Ware (01:15:23):

  And as you've written, looking back to neolithic, indigenous cultures isn't necessarily the way to go either. They were not immune to some of the same cruelties.

  John Sanbonmatsu (01:15:35):

  I think that's a really important point. I mean, there's an endless series of rationales used to justify the injustices that we see today. And one of them, say, well, the native peoples or neolithic people, they respected the animals before they killed them. And then they jump from that to, well, therefore I can go to McDonald's as though there's some connection there, which of course, it's like ludicrous. But we have to avoid the noble savage idea. Humans are wonderful, complex, scary, destructive, loving, strange creatures, and they always have been. I mean, there's been no culture that hasn't had its superstitions, its violence, its inequalities. Certainly indigenous cultures had great wisdom in a lot of ways, and certainly things that we can still learn from, but that doesn't mean we have to accept everything that earlier cultures did. And torture and killing of animals has gone on for thousands of years. So earlier civilizations had their own problems, and there is no going back. It's just a moot point. People who talk about primitivism, and we're going to go back to hunting and gathering, it's just preposterous. We're in a new mode of production. It's called capitalism, what comes next? And capitalism, if we survive it, we're going to have to come up with something else.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:16:50):

  Yeah. We really appreciate your foresight on that point too, because there is a tendency to sometimes homogenize and romanticize different cultures. And I think as you said in your book too, we are really trying to aspire toward the highest moral character that we are capable of. And that has manifested, as you just said, in many different forms throughout our history. And what would it look like going forward for us to tap into the best angels of our nature, which we have access to. We have access to the entire spectrum of the human experience. A small spectrum of that has been privileged for millennia, but what would it look like for us to privilege a different set of moral characteristics that we do have access to? And there are no answers to that question, but we always still ask to you know add to the tapestry of alternatives for a different type of human society that is living in deeper interconnectedness with the nonhuman kin. And yeah, we've so appreciated your major contributions to this work in so many ways - your critique of patriarchy, of capitalism, of human supremacy, of neoliberalism, the blindedness of the animal rights movement, et cetera. It's been such a pleasure talking to you and also just getting to know you and following your work. We're really grateful that you could join us today.

  John Sanbonmatsu (01:18:24):

  Oh, thanks so much, Nandita and Alan for the opportunity. W.H. Auden in his famous poem, September 1, 1939, which is about the outbreak of World War II, he ends up talking about these ironic points of light, he calls them that, kind of where the just exchange their messages. And I see us as part of this very small community of people who are trying to hold onto a kernel of hope in this kind of the gathering darkness of fascism and ecocide and horror, and it's super important to keep that flame flickering. So thank you, both of you for your commitment to this work and carving out this little space in the podcast. So again, I'm really delighted to have been here. Thank you.

  Alan Ware (01:19:05):

  Thank you, John.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:19:06):

  Yeah, thank you so much.

  Alan Ware (01:19:08):

  That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:19:37):

  Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.

More like this