Thank you for this episode. While I have immense respect for Rinella, I found he could not formulate a sufficient response to "why consider individual human suffering if we don't consider individual animal suffering?" All of his answers seem to boil down to "because it feels wrong," which is tautological and unconvincing. I can't think of an adequate answer either, and not having one completely collapses the rest of this worldview unless one accepts that human suffering should not, in fact, be a consideration. I do not accept that, so in my mind, I must reject this worldview.
Really interesting conversation. Keep up the good work, Szeps.
They really focus on cannibalism specifically (which I'm not sure is as rare throughout human history as he suggests; the amount of human sacrifice vs actual eating of the sacrifices in the pre-Columbian Americas continues to be a matter of historical debate). But his apple tree analogy really provides no argument for why we shouldn't just murder anyone who is a net negative towards the "tree", whether that be human society or a broader ecology.
It's also very strange the lack of empathy he's projecting towards invasive species. Again, one could argue easily that humans are invasive or destructive on a very widespread basis, so I would guess that his argument for not killing humans probably rests in some kind of theological claim about human exceptionalism, which they didn't quite get to.
Thank you for this episode. While I have immense respect for Rinella, I found he could not formulate a sufficient response to "why consider individual human suffering if we don't consider individual animal suffering?" All of his answers seem to boil down to "because it feels wrong," which is tautological and unconvincing. I can't think of an adequate answer either, and not having one completely collapses the rest of this worldview unless one accepts that human suffering should not, in fact, be a consideration. I do not accept that, so in my mind, I must reject this worldview.
Really interesting conversation. Keep up the good work, Szeps.
They really focus on cannibalism specifically (which I'm not sure is as rare throughout human history as he suggests; the amount of human sacrifice vs actual eating of the sacrifices in the pre-Columbian Americas continues to be a matter of historical debate). But his apple tree analogy really provides no argument for why we shouldn't just murder anyone who is a net negative towards the "tree", whether that be human society or a broader ecology.
It's also very strange the lack of empathy he's projecting towards invasive species. Again, one could argue easily that humans are invasive or destructive on a very widespread basis, so I would guess that his argument for not killing humans probably rests in some kind of theological claim about human exceptionalism, which they didn't quite get to.