Robert Wiblin: What’s something important that your political fellow travelers get really wrong, in your view?
Ezra Klein: Animal rights. Maybe since I’ve already said that, you want me to do a different one. But I do first want to say just animal rights.
Ezra Klein: I think this is just a tremendous quantity of suffering that a political movement that thinks of itself as concerned with suffering ignores. Not only ignores, but mocks and dismisses. A lot of people who think of themselves as good on all these issues, you say, “Well, how about we don’t torture so many chickens?” They’re like, “Oh, you crazy vegan.”
Robert Wiblin: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: I really don’t like it. I think it’s a way we teach ourselves to be less compassionate.
Discussion of progressive ordinal speciesism on the latest 80,000 Hours podcast: