Oscar Horta is a professor at the Department of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. He is one of the most legendary thinkers in the areas of antispeciesism and wild animal suffering. And I have asked him some questions.

"Morals is about the ultimate reasons why you do things."

1) Do you think that speciesism is the main reason why people choose to eat meat? Isn’t speciesism just one among many reasons?

(Examples for other reasons: selfishness, lack of empathy, lack of motivation to change, fear of change, laziness, …)

Hi! I’d say it’s not that all these reasons you mention are different reasons, they seem to be all intertwined in an attitude of disconcern for some individuals. We were taught since we were born that eating animals is OK, and we just did it, at least until a certain point. Most people never think of it anymore. Others think about it but not enough (as they never get in touch with others who don’t do it). Others, a tiny minority, may think of it and stop doing it, and others stop doing it because they get in touch with people who don’t do it and learn the reasons not to do it if they have. The point why speciesism is virtually always a part of eating meat is that those who eat animals would almost never want to eat humans.

2) Would you defend the idea that helping others is a moral duty? If so, why?

I don’t speak in terms of “moral duties”. But I’d say that the reasons not to inflict a certain harm to others are just as strong as the reasons to help them not to suffer a similar harm. If you believe you have a duty not to kill someone, even if that would cause you some benefit I think you should believe you have a similar duty to save that individual’s life, even if that means failing to get a benefit just as big as in the case of the killing. The reason is that the point of not harming someone should not be that you are the cause of the harm. That should not be relevant. The point is that such a harm should be avoided, and that happens in the same way if you are not the one who can harm someone but the one who can stop the harm from occurring.

3) One more question about moral duties: Would you agree that if we promote the idea that people should switch to a vegan diet (“go vegan”) then we must also offer reliable nutrition information about how to stay healthy on such a diet? Do you see this as a moral duty?

I think it may be useful to offer that information. But I don’t think doing that is a moral duty. Suppose someone has a liver condition that can be cured by getting a transplant, but there’s no donor. Suppose that person plans to kidnap you to kill you and get your liver transplanted. We can try to convince that person not to do so without that meaning that we have a moral duty to explain to him or her other ways to try to stay healthy without kidnapping others.

does harm human health and it also harms and kills many free-living non-human animals.)

dictionary environmentalism can be defined as an “advocacy of the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment; especially: the movement to control pollution”. This definition contains quite a few different ideas. Could you tell us which – if any – of these ideas you would support?

4) A question about environmentalism: The word “environmentalism” can have a few different meanings, for example according to the

That definition is vague, and it doesn’t address the reasons to do those kinds of things. I think that preserving the natural environment may in some cases be positive if that means that sentient individuals live better lives than they would otherwise, but in other cases transforming the environment would be better if it means improving the lives of sentient beings. Building some shelter for some animals means transforming the environment, which is no longer natural, in a way that makes the situation better for sentient beings (just as providing animals with treatments against disease which may save their lives is unnatural but very good). There are

. Studying this issue more would

about how to best do this. Similarly, if pollution is worse for animals, then it’s a bad thing. But we must reject

that claims that we should conserve ecosystems because the lives of animals are great there, as the latter is not the case. As for restoration efforts, they are bad for animals when they involve

and when they involve