Veganism, Atheism and Morality - Cosmic Skeptic - #103

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, friends. welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Alex O'Connor, otherwise known as Cosmic Skeptic. He's a YouTuber and a student at Oxford University, and I've been looking forward to sitting down with him for quite a while. His YouTube channel is incredibly interesting and very popular. And today we're talking about something which had nothing to do with his channel at all until very recently. Alex usually talks about philosophy and religion, and we do get on to that. But the more pressing issue, which I was interested to speak to him about, was his recent conversion to veganism, and not necessarily for the reasons that you might think. Alex didn't see images of factory farming, which evoked an emotional response. He had a philosophical discussion with some friends where he was unable to justify his eating of meat and the subsequent suffering of animals for his own sustenance. So yeah, get ready for that. It's a very compelling argument and I'm struggling to reconcile the fact that I consider myself to be a good human whilst also still eating meat. So I'll be very interested to hear if this changes your opinion to meat eating. Get at me at chriswillx wherever you follow me. I would love to hear your thoughts. Also make sure that you check out Alex's channel on YouTube, Cosmic Skeptic. It is really fantastic. But for now, please welcome the wise and wonderful Mr. Alex O'Connor.
I am joined by Alex O'Connor, otherwise known as Cosmic Skeptic. Alex, welcome to the show.

**Alex O'Connor** (1:50)
Thank you for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:51)
It's a pleasure to have you on. We'll have a lot of your fans tuning in, I'm sure, as well. Been a lot of changes. Recently, we've been talking about booking this appointment in with yourself for a little while, and the topics I've wanted to talk about have moved as the year's gone on. First things first, you've recently become vegan.

**Alex O'Connor** (2:10)
That's right, yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (2:11)
Can you tell us the story behind that, please?

**Alex O'Connor** (2:14)
Yeah, sure. I mean, you say recently, it's recent in the long scheme of things, but it's been maybe four or five months now, coming on half a year soon. For a very long time, I've been thinking about it. And when you talk about philosophy, and for some reason atheism, it seems to lend itself. Your audience will always kind of say, what do you think about this? I've always found it very strange. Someone likes what you have to say on one topic, and they're desperate to hear on what you have to say on Brexit, on veganism or whatever it is. And I've never quite understood that. It's like really enjoying a footballer's commentary on a game or something and say, oh yeah, but what do you think about this political issue? It's like, well, that's not what I do. I do philosophy of religion, but people wanted me to talk about veganism, so I did it in the past. And you find yourself kind of jumping through hoops. And if you listen to people like Sam Harris or someone when they're asked about morality, especially because his veganism, his moral philosophy is based on suffering, someone says, why aren't you a vegan? And he just kind of, he just, he answers like a politician, you know, he's like, well, we have to, you know, we have to have an honest conversation about the precepts of the stuff. And it's like, man, just just admit that you know you should be a vegan. So I was kind of in that spot and I was talking to friends and essentially saying, I'm pretty sure that veganism is the moral thing to do, but let me give you some arguments against it and see where we can go. And it just didn't work. And then eventually I was like, you know what, I'm going to put out a video essentially saying to people, here are the reasons for going vegan, try and talk me out of it. And the main thing that got me thinking about it was Peter Singer's book, Animal Liberation. Peter Singer is probably the most important philosopher in my life in terms of how he's changed the way I think. I mean, there are lots of atheist philosophers who I'd be more closely associated to because that's what I've spoken about, but they were more people who I listened to and admired, but they didn't really overhaul the way that I'm living my life. Peter Singer has done that completely with animal rights and also with his writings on philanthropy. So I read that and I thought, man, this is big, this is a big problem. And so I made the video, no one talked me out of it, so I went vegan.