Do Public Intellectuals Avoid Advocating Fringe But Worthwhile Ideas for Fear of Discrediting Themselves in the Eyes of the Public?
The most recent episode of the podcast Our Henhouse (available here and wherever else you get your podcasts) features an interview with filmmaker Mark DeVries. Those of my readers who come here for the occasional vegan/animal-rights content will be familiar with DeVries from his film Speciesism: The Movie. That film includes interviews with important figures in the animal rights movement, including Peter Singer and the late great Sherry Colb. DeVries is now promoting his new film, Humans and Other Animals, which is currently screening and will be available for streaming in the near future. I look forward to seeing the film and very much hope that it is widely influential.
In today's essay, I want to focus on something DeVries said early in the interview. Discussing the positive influence on his thinking of Steven Pinker, he and host Mariann Sullivan wondered why public intellectuals whose logic seems to lead to veganism do not change their behavior. Part of the answer is that they're engaged in motivated reasoning. For example, consider an exchange some years ago between Pinker and Sam Harris in response to a question from an audience member about why people who agree with the arguments for veganism don't then make the switch. Pinker and Harris each said that social norms and pressures play a substantial role, which is plainly right.
But then each also said something ridiculous. Pinker repeated the claim he made in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature that humans naturally crave meat. In the book, he called this supposed phenomenon "meat hunger." It's absurd. Unlike obligate carnivores (such as cats) or true omnivores (such as dogs), very few humans like the taste of raw meat. Those who eat meat typically season it with spices, herbs, and sauces derived from vegetables. Meanwhile, there are by now so many meat substitutes that are close enough that anyone who cared even a tiny bit about animal suffering would make the small sacrifice (which, I assure you, is not even experienced as a sacrifice for more than a few weeks) of substituting plant-based products for animal-based ones. Meanwhile, Pinker does not even try to claim that there is such a thing as "milk hunger" or "egg hunger," leaving the practices of consuming those products completely unrationalized.
Harris's self-serving rationalization was even worse. To my amazement, he repeated the claim that Sherry Colb and I critiqued in If We Didn't Eat Them, They Wouldn't Exist. He imagined a post-factory-farming world in which animals raised for food have, on net, lives worth living, even after one subtracts the disutility of their slaughter. He didn't explain how this justifies his current consumption of animal products from animals with lives of misery, but put that aside. Even on its own terms, Harris made little sense.
In our article, Sherry and I addressed the question whether it benefits farmed animals to eat them if they have lives worth living. That, as we explained, implicates a longstanding philosophical puzzle--the so-called nonidentity problem. Our argument disposes of the puzzle in the animal case, but even if one were not convinced by our argument, Harris would be wrong. He wasn't saying you're doing the particular animal or species of animal you eat a service; he seemed to think that one is doing good in the world by eating meat from animals with lives worth living, because if one eats tofu instead, there are that many fewer animals with lives worth living.
Had Harris bothered to think this point through, he would have seen that it's wrong. The incredible inefficiency of converting plants into feed into meat and other products from animals relative to direct human consumption of plants means that if everyone switched from eating animal products to eating exclusively plant-based foods, humans would need only a quarter of the land now under cultivation or used as pasture. So if you ate the plant-based foods grown on a quarter of the land used to grow soybeans and other crops to feed to livestock, the remaining three quarters of the land would grow wild, where there would be . . . wait for it . . . wild animals having lives worth living. And no, nature is not simply red in tooth and claw, so the switch to a plant-exclusive diet would mean that the numerous wild animals who would live on three quarters of the re-wilded land now under cultivation by humans would have greater utility than the supposedly happy farmed animals awaiting slaughter.
Pinker and Harris are smart guys, but smart people say stupid things when sufficiently motivated to do so by their perceived self-interest.
Sullivan and DeVries didn't get into any of that in the Our Henhouse segment. Rather, they hypothesized that Pinker, Harris, and other public intellectuals (like Richard Dawkins) with views that ought to lead to veganism perhaps trim their public statements (and their conduct) to avoid discrediting themselves among a general public that regards veganism as an eccentricity at best and regards vegans as self-righteous assholes. (Those are my words, but I think I've captured the gist of the point.) For the reasons given above, I'm doubtful that this hypothesis explains Pinker or Harris, but I don't doubt that it could account for the stance of some other folks.
Some fringe views rightly undercut the general credibility of those who espouse them. Suppose you hire an expert witness to testify about whether one circuit board infringes the patent for another circuit board. Now suppose that as you're taking a break from prepping your witness before trial and just talking, the expert witness casually mentions that he thinks the moon landing was faked, the Earth is flat, and windmills cause cancer. Even if you detected no flaws in the expert's discussion of electronics--his area of expertise--you would rightly wonder whether you should have hired a different expert. "This guy's a nut," you would think, and you'd worry about what nutty things he might blurt out on cross-examination.
Genuinely crazy views thus understandably discredit people who espouse them. The problem is that worthwhile but unconventional ideas can also discredit people who espouse them in the eyes of the people who uncritically accept the wrong but conventional wisdom. So long as veganism is regarded as kooky by people who have been indoctrinated to believe that eating animal products is morally unobjectionable and even necessary to human thriving, it is rational for someone who cares about their reputation to avoid advocating veganism or even practicing veganism, lest they be seen as a kook.
One shouldn't get too carried away with that sort of worry, however. I've been practicing and advocating veganism for 18 years, and I don't think it has cost my reputation as a legal scholar at all. Maybe that's because veganism is more accepted in academia than in other walks of life, but public intellectuals are, after all, intellectuals, who are writing and speaking for audiences that are quite similar to academic audiences. So I strongly suspect that someone like Pinker or Harris could, if they cared to, practice and preach veganism without it affecting their reputation more generally.
Consider Peter Singer, who is almost completely vegan and an outspoken proponent of living in a way that reduces animal suffering. I have the strong sense that Singer's well-known concern for animals does not in any way undercut his credibility in advocating for other causes, such as effective altruism aimed at improving the lives of the planet's least well-off humans. No one has ever told me that some argument I made about the scope of the Commerce Clause must be wrong because I'm a kooky vegan; and I doubt that anyone has ever remotely credibly resisted Singer's argument for greater concern for combating human hunger by pointing out that he's the kind of kook who cares about the welfare of chickens.
To be clear, I'm not making a categorical claim. Surely there are times and places when the cogent expression of unorthodox views meets with ridicule and fully discredits the speaker in the eyes of those too blinded by habit, ideology, or perceived self-interest to reconsider their cherished myths. Galileo was forced to recant, after all.
Accordingly, I agree with a closely related point that DeVries made during the Our Henhouse interview: in many movements for radical change, typically the early advocates will be people who are not especially concerned with their reputations or in conforming to social norms that they do not personally find to be independently worthwhile. Only after there has been sufficient progress for the movement to fall within the range of socially acceptable views or conduct will more establishment--less kooky-seeming--people publicly join it.
Accordingly, perhaps my own experience and my impression of Singer's status show that at least for the last two decades or so, the view that it is unethical to painfully exploit and kill animals for food has gained sufficient traction as not to count as kooky. Thus, I end on a positive note!