this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news storie for at the top of the hour straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. when we talk about people with the power to change the world, we're usually thinking of political leaders or maybe corporate titans but today, my guest is a philosopher who's harnessed the power of ideas to influence collective behaviour. australian peter singer has spent a lifetime wrestling with ethical choices in the real world, most notably in the field of animal rights. five decades after first publishing his manifesto calling for animal liberation, has the movement he inspired become unstoppable?

peter singer, welcome to hardtalk. thank you, stephen. it's good to be with you again. it's great to be here and have you here with me, and partly the reason is because you've written an updated, rewritten version of that book you almost five decades ago, animal liberation. it's called animal liberation now. is the publication of this update recognition that your call, your demand for a new relationship between humanity and all the other creatures on this planet, that that call failed?

well, it failed to achieve what i had hoped it would achieve and what i believe ethically it needs to achieve, that's true. it didn't totally fail because there is now an animal rights movement which is a powerfulforce in many of the countries in the world and many people kindly credit my book as having triggered or inspired that movement. and that movement has had some achievements in some countries, i wouldn't deny that, but if we look at it globally, there are more animals in factory farms than there were ever before and there are more animals suffering from human use and misuse than there were before, so yes, i have to accept in that sense, it has failed. isn't your most fundamental principle a simple one? that is, that human beings have no moral, ethical right to exploit in any way other animals on this planet?

that we have a moral duty to treat them as equals? i think we have a moral duty to treat their interests in not feeling pain and not suffering as equal to the interests that we humans have in not feeling pain and suffering. so, that's the kind of fundamental moral equality that i believe we should recognise. but, of course, they're not equals politically, they can't vote, they can't think about the future and plan for the future as we do so, inevitably, we are going to be making decisions that affect them. i object, though, to when those decisions say because they're not members of our species, they don't really count and we can either discount or even completely ignore their pain and suffering. and on reflection, do you think it was usefulfor you, at the very outset of this argument, to say to all of us human beings in animal

liberation — the original work — useful to say, we should view the way that we exploit and abuse animals as — well, you use the word �*speciesist�* — but also as akin to slavery or racism, something that we now regard as something completely unacceptable. do you think that resonated with most of humanity? well, i said that because i wanted to get people to take the issue seriously. i felt that, at the time the first book came out, issues about animals were just not taken as serious moral questions at all and i do think that i and the animal movement have succeeded in making people recognise that these are serious moral issues. so, to that extent, i think i was justified in what i said. that doesn't mean that i've persuaded everybody to look at it in this way but i want people to see the analogies between those — racism,

sexism and speciesism. now, you talk about the degree to which you are disappointed and you talked about exploitation of animals through, for example, factory farming. is part of the problem here that the book and the updated book, they have a much wider audience and arguably, much greater influence, in the western world — of which, of course, you are a part — than they do in the developing and emerging economies of this world — i'm thinking, for example, of china where, actually, the argument right now is perhaps most humane and most important because it's in countries like china that the massive expansion of meat consumption and of industrialised factory farming is happening? that's true. and i hope that in some time, these ideas will have resonance in china.

you're right that at the moment, they don't, and china is enormously increasing its production of animals and it's all through this industrialised production. they're building 26—storey buildings that are just full of pigs who, of course, never leave those buildings. and i'm very keen for these ideas to become global and to spread to other countries. but can you understand when people in china and other emerging economies, too, might listen to your argument and think to themselves, "there's something going "on here which is akin to the arguments about climate "change and about our right to industrialise, to fully "industrialise, and to exploit natural resources in the way "that the west did for hundreds of years "to build their economic supremacy?" the chinese person might think, "i have a right to enjoy "consuming meat in a way that westerners have done "for decades, if not for centuries. "who is peter singer to tell me thatjust as i acquire enough "prosperity and my economy is sufficiently able to produce

"cheap meat, just as i'm able to enjoy that, he says "�*sorry, you can't�* ? " well, i think you need to move away from it. and, you know, it's not me telling you, it's rather saying look at what you are doing to animals, look at what this system of production is doing to animals and ask yourself whether you can really defend and justify that. and, of course, within asian traditions, there are traditions that suggest that you need to be compassionate to all animals and buddhism is a part of chinese tradition, part of their ethics and, certainly, i think a true understanding of buddhist ethics would say this is not acceptable. you talk about sentient beings and that, to you, is hugely important because, as you said at the beginning of the interview, animals, as you say, feel pain, experience pain and, indeed, pleasure just as we humans do and that's why it's so important to treat them with respect. at what point do you decide that a creature doesn't

experience those things? it is no longer sentient? because you rather famously said, "you know what? "i'm not against eating an oyster because i don't "believe that it's a sentient creature". so, what's your cut—off? i mean, how do you decide what's sentient and what isn't? i think that's an open scientific question and we have to assemble the best evidence we can. oysters have very rudimentary nervous systems and they don't move, they can't run away from a sense of danger, so i think many other creatures who can move have evolved capacities to feel pain to warn them of danger. that doesn't seem plausible in the case of an oyster. i mean, you're a philosopher and a bioethicist. are you truly qualified to tell the world what feels sufficient pain to not be consumed by humans? i'm qualified to read the scientific literature and to summarise that and to discuss it with some

people who are more knowledgeable than i am and i'm giving my opinion based on that but no, i don't claim expertise in that area. crosstalk. i'm not trying to be flippant but this is important. what about insects, for example, because there's a whole school of thought which says as we try to move away from meat production — not least because of the carbon emissions, the greenhouse gas emissions — we should embrace the industrialised production of insects as food. what about their sentience? i'm agnostic on that. i don't really know if they're sentient — i don't think anybody does — and for that reason, i would prefer that we find plant—based sources of food or perhaps cellular cultivation of meat, which is another possibility that is now — there's a lot of investment going on in producing cellular meat. so, i would rather that we moved in that direction than possibly, i don't know, but possibly harm tens of millions of insects in order to produce food. you've highlighted the fact that in some parts of the world, trends are not working in the direction you would like to see them go.

in other parts of the world — i'm thinking particularly of europe — there are much tougher rules and regulations in place now to get rid of the most sort of egregious, as you would see it, industrialised factory farming practices. so, why do you think that some — for example, in europe — are prepared to listen to you when others in the united states, for example — who, again, part of the sort of western community of nations — have listened to you and actually ignored you? well, i don't agree that individuals in the united states have ignored me because... the system has ignored you. the system has, but i — if you look at the states like california that are able to have citizen—initiated referendums, they vote in the way i want,. they passed proposition 12, recently upheld by the us

supreme court, which does require that animals all have space to be able to turn around, to stretch their limbs without bumping into the sides of their enclosure, and that is somewhat similar to the european and united kingdom regulations. the problem with the united states is that the federal political system doesn't allow citizens to vote on these issues and it's corrupted by money. the — i mean, i'm not saying that money doesn't have any influence on politics in europe or the united kingdom — it clearly does — but it has much more power in the united states and i think the system is really corrupted by the money of lobbyists, including, of course, agribusiness. you're — famously, you draw a lot of your ideas from sort of utilitarianism and the sort of rational pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number. do you think on that level, it has really helped your argument that since you originally wrote animal liberation and now, you've updated it, in the intervening years, there is much greater emphasis on the degree to which the production of animal meat is extraordinarily

bad for climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. i think 15%, possibly, of all the world's emissions can be ascribed to livestock farming. does that help your argument? i think it does help, and one of the reasons i wanted to bring out a new version is to include climate change in the discussion that i already had in the book about reasons for an ethical diet. what is it to eat an ethical diet? and i think, actually, this is one of the easier ways we can cut greenhouse gases. we don't need new technologies, we don't need to redo the power grid, we just have to stop eating meat and, as you say, we'll cut that 15% and that's really going to be important in the battle to avoid catastrophic climate change. yeah. you don't necessarily need to stop eating meat, do you? you canjust become a different kind of meat consumer — you can become an ethical omnivore, i think the phrase is — where you make a point of saying, "i know where "the meat i'm purchasing comes from. "it was grown in a farm

which is committed to humane "practices. "the animals are basically happy, until they are killed "humanely and on that basis, i'm good to eat the meat." would you agree that those people are good to eat that meat? well, from the point of view of the animals, it's a defensible viewpoint. i don't do it myself but i can understand people being conscientious about ensuring that the animals do have good lives. it's not that easy to find any more, but it's possible. but going back to climate change, as you mentioned, if they're eating grass—fed beef or lamb, then there's still the climate problem. it doesn't solve that problem. in fact, eating grass means that it takes longer for the animals to reach market weight, which means they're going to produce more methane — the greenhouse gas that is very powerful and accelerates climate change — over their lifetime than they would if they were factory farmed. so, it's hard to find anything that will be both humane and will not contribute

to climate change. what about lab—based meat? again, science is moving very fast. now, it is possible to take cells from live animals, develop them, cultivate them in a lab and produce essentially a meat which is both synthetic but drawn from the original animal. now, you don't like eating meat. you don't think that's good for humanity. but on the basis it was grown in a lab, are you going to give that a pass? iam. i'm fine with that. and if that moves people away from eating meat that comes from animals and that causes harm to animals and climate change, yes, iwould welcome that development. ok, let's talk about a different aspect of your concern about the way we humans treat animals, and that's experimentation — particularly medical experimentation. hundreds of millions of animals each year are used in medical lab—based experiments. we can, indeed, thank the inventors of the various covid vaccines for using animals to make sure that those vaccines were safe for humanity. except you're not prepared to thank them, are you? why not?

well, i'm not absolutist about animal experiments. there are some circumstances in which maybe the benefits are so great and there is no other way of doing it and the harms to animals are absolutely minimised... would the race to find covid vaccines be one of them? well, at some stages but, in fact, in the race to find safe covid vaccines, the research community did not make use of thousands — tens of thousands of volunteers who wanted to be challenged themselves. there was an organisation called one day sooner, which said, "we can get the vaccine sooner if you make "use of these fully informed human volunteers "who are prepared to have candidate vaccines tested "on them and then be challenged with a virus". and i think it was a mistake not to do that. it would have saved animals but, perhaps more importantly, you might think, it would have saved human lives.

now, this is where you, as an ethicist, get into really hot water, isn't it? because now we've gone into that territory of using humans for experiments. you say, as i understand it — tell me if i am wrong — that there is no more ethical justification for experimenting on a rat or a mouse than a severely intellectually disabled human — that is a human who is sort of in a vegetative state. you are saying, "you know what? "use those humans for tests of medicines." well, if somebody is in a vegetative state and if we've done brain imaging to show that they can never recover from that state, then, yes, i think it doesn't really harm them, they're not conscious, they're not capable of suffering. and as models, in fact, they would be more valuable because we've done all sorts of things in curing cancer in mice, for example, but they don't translate to humans. if you could use humans who are incapable and would never recover consciousness, i do think that would be a more valuable and more ethical thing to do. well, you, as the detached rational utilitarian, might think that.

what do you think the families of people who are currently in comas in hospital are going to think when they hear that the famous philosopher peter singer says, "you know what? "that alive human being should be taken off and experimented "on for radical new drugs." well, families of people who are brain dead will allow their organs to be used to benefit others. i think they will recognise that there is no benefit to the human in continuing to have a heart that could save the life of someone else. so, perhaps they will also feel that out of this tragedy, some good can come. you do appear to have a view of what it means to be severely disabled and often, you focus on intellectual disablement, but sometimes on physical disablement, too. you have a view which seems to say that those human beings have less value and you say that when a new human is born, if they are born with conditions, for example, down's, spina bifida, haemophilia, then the parents of that newborn should have the right to end the child's life. many people — many people find that deeply disturbing. i agree, people do find it disturbing, but those same people would probably say that it is a woman's right to have prenatal diagnosis

when she's pregnant and if she discovers that her child is going to have one of those conditions you mentioned, to terminate the pregnancy. i don't really see a big difference in terms of our attitude to disabilities, whether you do that when you're pregnant to end the life of the foetus or whether you do it in the weeks after birth. really? so, in a sense, you're with those anti—abortion campaigners in the united states who say that life begins at conception and all of the rights that apply to somebody alive in this world of ours, those rights also apply to the foetus in the mother's womb? i agree that life believes at conception — it seems to me an undeniable claim that a human life begins at conception. i don't agree that you have the rights at conception that

you or i have because you are obviously not capable of having wants or preferences or being able to consent to anything, but i agree that birth in itself, the line between a foetus and a week—old infant is not really a line of sharp moral distinction. i want to put to you the words of the late harriet mcbryde johnson. now, she was a lawyer, she was a disability rights campaigner who used a wheelchair, and she said i think back in 2003 about you and your ideas, she said, "i am horrified by what peter singer says, "by the fact that i have been sucked into a discussion "of whether i ought to exist". what's your response to that? i invited her to princeton and she spoke to my class, so we had, i think, a very fruitful discussion that helped the class to see both sides of that argument, and that's the way i teach. we should have those

discussions, yes. but, of course, the same would have happened if she — if her mother had terminated the pregnancy in utero, again, and every person with down's syndrome could say that to any woman who terminates the pregnancy because the foetus has down's syndrome. but about 85% of women who are told that their foetus does have down's syndrome will terminate the pregnancy. itjust seems to some that you have such a complete commitment to the rights of animals but you don't have quite such a commitment to the rights of all human beings. i don't think that's true. i think i have at least as greater commitment to the rights of human beings. what i'm trying to do is to reduce the suffering and unnecessary pain and distress of sentient beings everywhere, and i give weight to the interests of animals, i give weight to the interests of humans. but forgive me for being personal, and correct me if i'm wrong, but i think perhaps you had to reflect very carefully on this when your own mother was very ill toward the end of her life, when you, as it was reported, spent a great deal of money trying to keep her alive and to give her medical assistance when the utilitarian

in you, given the state she was in, might have regarded it as of greater utility to end her life. but when it came personal, you didn't. well, it wasn't my decision alone. i have a sister and we had adult... my mother had adult grandchildren who wanted to participate, and it was a family decision. so, it does get complicated? it gets complicated, i agree. because maybe utilitarian and rationality can't quite caterfor human emotion, for compassion, for empathy, for family bonds and loyalties and ties which are a part of the philosophical mix, even if you try to exclude them. i mean, in the end, it becomes — certainly becomes a complicated discussion, and you have to try to take the interests of all family involved and, obviously, i did not want to have a serious breach with my sister or with my nieces, so i went along with that decision. i think had i been the only one

looking after my mother, because she had reached the stage where she no longer recognised anybody and i don't think she was capable of enjoying her life in any way, i would have asked the doctor to withdraw life support at an earlier stage. a final thought, peter singer. people around the world are fascinated by your thoughts on all sorts of different things — and i do want to ask you about the rise and the power of artificial intelligence because, again, it seems to me, philosophically, it gets into areas of rights and relationships with us, the human species. there is talk now of intelligent machines acquiring a degree of intellectual autonomy — in a sense, a form of consciousness. can you imagine a time when you are not only fighting for the rights of animals but for the rights of intelligent machines?

yes, ican. i certainly think it's possible at some stage that we will have conscious machines, machines with desires, perhaps machines who can suffer or enjoy their existence and if that happens, then i think they will also have rights and we will need to treat them better than we are treating animals today because we still haven't given them the rights they should have. or, alternatively, if they are super intelligent and perhaps way more intellectually capable than we humans, we may be pleading with them to give us some rights. yes, and that's a problem we're trying to work on to make sure that if they are more intelligent than us, their values are aligned with ours, so that they will recognise that. but it's a risk, and a lot of philosophers and other thinkers are concerned about that risk and are saying, "well, perhaps it will be foolish to create something "more intelligent that we are. "perhaps that's a bad move in darwinian terms." what do you think? are you confident that we human beings can get this right?

no, i couldn't say i'm confident. i think it is — i think it is a risk. i think it would be wise if we could have a pause now so we can reflect before we go further. but given that this is a global issue and, again, you have to go back to many other countries that are working on al — including china — are we going to get global agreement to pause and take stock before we go too far? i'm not at all confident that we will. peter singer, it's been a great pleasure talking to you. thank you for being on hardtalk. thank you, steve. thank you. hello there. the rain came pouring down on sunday. there was some flooding in places and for a while a lot of thunder and lightning as well, but the storms have eased. the rain, though, continues to be heavy and it continues to push its way northwards away

from northern england, coming to rest in scotland by monday morning. and it's muggy air that follows behind that rain, so temperatures around 14 or 15 degrees. but we start with that wet weather in the morning in scotland, heavy rain to begin with. it'll move away to the north—west, clearing away to be replaced across the uk by sunny spells and a scattering of showers developing, the odd heavy thundery one in the afternoon for northern ireland and scotland. for england and wales, there'll be fewer showers, particularly in the south, and you may get away with a dry day. it will be warm in the sunshine, the winds a little bit brisker, perhaps, but temperatures in the mid 20s. much better weather for the cricket at edgbaston. but low pressure continues to bring the threat of some rain as we move into tuesday. we've got that muggy air coming in on that southerly breeze, but that's where the wet weather

is moving in from as well. so we've got this heavy, potentially thundery rain moving northwards across england and wales on tuesday morning, up into scotland. some sunshine around outside of that rain, but that could trigger some more thundery showers here and there. and temperatures may not be quite so high on tuesday, 20 to 22 celsius, probably nearer the mark. heading into wednesday, and again, some more warm sunshine, but more heavy, slow—moving, thundery showers breaking out, in particular in scotland, northern ireland, perhaps the north—west of england and north wales. it's drier and it's brighter and it's sunnier towards the south—east and that's where it's warmer as well — 25 or even 26 degrees midweek. may see a little area of high pressure coming in from the south—west on thursday before this rain arrives in from the atlantic on friday. there are some heavy, thundery downpours very close by in the near continent, but thursday should be a drier day. ridge of high pressure, the air�*s descending more, limiting the amount of showers, limiting the heavy showers. a lot of places will be dry and quite sunny. we will see the highest temperatures again towards the south—east.

out towards the west, it is just a little bit cooler. so we've got the chance of some showers for the next few days that could be heavy and thundery. particularly in the south—east later, it should turn drier, but also quite a bit warmer as well.