The Importance of Animal Welfare

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

M i too have met scientism as a dirty word and er em. But you're talking about using science to explain things like morality. And i've been rather persuaded, i must say, by recent arguments that i've read suggesting that maybe you do need a premise like suffering is bad. Who's going to deny that suffering is bad? I mean, it seems it'se. It's such an easy premise to accept. Once you accept that, then science takes over. Sigt, science takes over because we can then work out, am what is going to cause suffering. There's room for argument about whether earthworms suffer em - but i don't think we can necessarily settle

In episode 205, Michael Shermer speaks with Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene, voted The Royal Society’s Most Inspiring Science Book of All Time, and also the bestsellers The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor’s Tale, The God Delusion, and two volumes of autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark. He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford and both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.

This episode is heavily edited because Dawkins was having trouble with his voice, and Shermer tried to speak a little more to give Dawkins a chance to let his voice rest.