Josh Milburn, "Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Summary

---

Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Animal Studies Channel
Episode: Josh Milburn, Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford UP, 2023)
Date: February 21, 2026
Host: Kyle Johansen
Guest: Dr. Josh Milburn (Lecturer in Political Philosophy, Loughborough University; Host of Knowing Animals podcast)

---

Overview: Main Theme and Purpose

This episode features a conversation between host Kyle Johansen and philosopher Dr. Josh Milburn about Milburn’s new book, Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully. The discussion explores the case for a non-vegan but animal rights–respecting future food system, challenging standard assumptions in animal activism and political philosophy regarding veganism as the ideal. Milburn articulates a vision where humans and animals can co-exist with respectful interdependence, especially when it comes to the ethics of food production and consumption.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. About Dr. Josh Milburn and the Book’s Motivations

• Background: Milburn’s work focuses on moral and political philosophy, particularly animal rights and food ethics ([02:27]).
• Motivation for the Book: Arises from serious engagement with nuanced arguments against veganism and a desire to explore what a “just” human-animal food relationship could look like ([06:05]).
• Two Foundations: Combines rigorous examination of veganism’s “edge cases” with political theories on animals’ inclusion as members of society ([06:05]).

2. Critical Perspective on Veganism

• Clarification: The book is “critical of veganism, but in a very specific way” ([11:21]).
  • Milburn argues for animal rights as foundational but suggests there may be principled reasons for a non-vegan, rights-respecting ideal society.
  • “A vegan food system is not a panacea,” and may not solve every problem from an animal rights perspective ([11:21]).
• Key Distinction: Commitment to animal rights may lead to different conclusions than commitment to veganism; sometimes, respecting animal rights could include non-vegan elements ([11:21]–[14:39]).
  • “There might actually be a gap between a commitment to animal rights and a commitment to veganism. And when those are in tension, my commitment is to animal rights, not to veganism.” — Josh Milburn ([14:39])

3. Flipping the Conventional Veganism vs. Idealism Paradigm

• Standard View: Many see veganism/abolitionism as the ideal, and compromise only for pragmatic, non-ideal reasons.
• Milburn’s Argument: In ideal theory, a non-vegan (but animal rights-respecting) food system could be the true ideal; veganism is optimal mainly under current, non-ideal conditions ([16:03]).
  • “The ideal that we're aiming for should be ... a non-vegan system. But this is a non-vegan system that is very, very far removed from the non-vegan system that we currently have.” ([16:03])
• Practical Implication: Calls for abolishing animal agriculture as currently practiced, but leaves room for animal products when produced via rights-respecting, non-exploitative methods ([16:03]–[20:31]).

4. Options for Ethical Animal Products and Future Food Systems

Milburn outlines four “gaps” or opportunities for animal products in a just future:

• 1. Non-sentient animals: (e.g., oysters, jellyfish) can be used without rights violation;
• 2. Plant-based analogues: (e.g., plant-based meats);
• 3. Cellular agriculture: Producing animal products at a cellular level without harm (cultivated meat, milk, etc.);
• 4. Respectful co-production: Hypothetical models where animals are treated as protected “workers,” e.g., egg-laying hens with full rights ([16:03]–[20:31]).

5. Liberal Pluralism and Conceptions of the Good

• Accommodation Argument: Non-vegan, rights-respecting systems better accommodate diverse, reasonable conceptions of the good within liberal democracies ([23:55]–[28:42]).
  • Many people’s meaningful experiences (e.g., religious, cultural, aesthetic, professional) are intertwined with animal products.
  • State should not “cut off someone’s route to their good life without a very good reason” ([23:55]).
• Important Caveat: This argument never justifies rights violations; only “rights-respecting” animal products are permissible ([23:55]).
  • “All they do is they offer us a very good reason to try to find a rights respecting way for them to realise the things that are important to them.” — Josh Milburn ([33:00])

6. On Reasonableness and Justice

• Reasonableness of Conceptions of Good: Challenges arise over whether animal-product-reliant conceptions are reasonable. Milburn introduces the distinction between “contingently unreasonable” and “necessarily unreasonable” notions—sometimes, social context makes a conception problematic, but it could be rendered reasonable in a just society ([29:39]–[33:00]).
• Justice vs. Mere Morality:
  • Justice / Rights: Those duties that can rightly be enforced by the state—concerns with rights violations ([37:51]).
  • Mere Morality: Non-enforceable duties, potentially important but not matters of justice; e.g., individual religious dietary practices ([40:28]).
  • It’s plausible and appropriate for individuals to observe “stricter” standards than what justice enforces ([40:28]).

7. Invertebrate Ethics & Uncertainty

• Sentience Trichotomy:
  • Probably sentient (e.g., octopus)—deserve full rights.
  • Probably not sentient (e.g., oysters, jellyfish)—no rights; permissible for consumption.
  • Plausibly sentient (e.g., insects, ambiguous cases)—require cautious, suffering-avoidant treatment ([43:10]–[49:22]).
• Psychological Continuity: For plausibly sentient animals with low “psychological continuity” (no persistent self), suffering is more ethically significant than killing ([51:10]).

8. Cellular Agriculture and the Future of Food

• Definition: Production of animal products at the cellular, not organism, level. Includes cultivated (“lab-grown”) meat, milk, etc. ([53:21]).
  • “Cellular agriculture could produce animal products that are able to replicate that almost exactly ... from the consumer’s perspective ... these products are basically the same.” ([53:21])
• Ethical Upside: Can satisfy the needs of humans (and non-human carnivores, e.g., cats) for animal products without rights violation ([57:24]–[58:48]).
• Relevance for Activists: Vegans may be less interested in cultivated meat for themselves, but much more supportive when it comes to animal food (e.g., cat food) ([58:48]).

9. Animals as Rights-Bearing ‘Workers’

• Cultivated Meat Models:
  1. “Pig in the backyard” (pets donate cells directly).
  2. Mail-order cells (disembodied cell lines).
  3. Animal worker model (animals as protected “workers”) ([60:15]).
• Worker Model Details:
  • Animals retain “genuine protections as workers”—right to safety, leisure, even “pay,” and the possibility (for, e.g., chickens) of retirement and health care ([60:15]; [64:52]).
• Concrete Example: Chickens and Eggs:
  • Current breeds sometimes suffer due to being bred for high productivity (e.g., ovarian cancer). Proposed system: short, well-protected periods of egg-laying, followed by retirement with full care ([64:52]).
  • Contraception might be used post-retirement to prevent illness. This model aims to let humans “have our cow and eat her, too”: combine animal welfare and meaningful human-animal relationships ([64:52]–[70:37]).

10. Implications for Animal Activism

• No Single Activist Approach Mandated: Milburn’s framework is compatible with a range of activist strategies (abolitionist, welfarist, pro-technology), but encourages openness to new technologies like cellular agriculture ([70:51]).
• Activism Today: While advocating a non-vegan ideal, Milburn stresses there are still “very good reasons” to promote vegan activism under current conditions; his vision is about the direction, not immediate tactics ([70:51]–[73:23]).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the book’s challenge to veganism:

  • “A vegan food system is not a panacea. It's not going to solve all of our problems or it's not immediately clear that it will. There are questions that we should raise about a vegan food system.” — Milburn ([11:21])

• On animal rights vs. veganism:

  • “There might actually be a gap between a commitment to animal rights and a commitment to veganism. And when those are in tension, my commitment is to animal rights, not to veganism.” — Milburn ([14:39])

• On liberal pluralism:

  • “Every time we cut off someone's route to their good life without a very good reason, that's a tragedy. And even when we cut it off with a very good reason, that too is a tragedy.” — Milburn ([23:95])

• On the importance of ideal theory:

  • “We can't really do rigorous non ideal theory ... without having done some ideal theory first. We don't know ... where we're going, [so] we can't have a very good conversation about how to get there.” — Milburn ([22:07])

• On animal rights as justice:

  • “I'm saying it is unjust for us to kill animals. ... If you think it’s okay to kill animals and you actually act upon that, the state should step in and prevent you.” — Milburn ([33:00])

• On sentience and policy for invertebrates:

  • “Because there's so much uncertainty with these animals ... [they] should have a right to protection from those treatments that our best estimates suggest would lead to them suffering.” — Milburn ([49:22])

• On the future of animal food for pets:

  • “Vegans and vegetarians aren’t particularly interested in purchasing cultivated meat for themselves, but they are very interested ... for their companion animals. … The market for cultivated meat as pet food could actually be quite different.” — Milburn ([58:48])

• On animals as workers:

  • “Animals are welcome in our future society ... and can contribute to our society, provided that contribution carries with it the sorts of protections and assurances that we give each other.” — Milburn ([60:15])

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:27] – Dr. Milburn introduces his background and motivation for the book.
• [06:05] – Origins of the project: “why write this book?”
• [11:21] – What the book does and does not challenge about veganism.
• [14:39] – Flipping the relationship between veganism and the ideal.
• [16:03] – Introducing alternative models for just food systems.
• [23:55] – Accommodating plural conceptions of the good in food policy.
• [29:39] – Differentiating reasonable and unreasonable conceptions of the good.
• [33:00] – On justice, state intervention, and non-justifiable rights violations.
• [37:51] – Justice vs. mere morality explained.
• [43:10] – Sentience trichotomy and policy implications for invertebrates.
• [51:10] – Role of psychological continuity in animal ethics.
• [53:21] – What is cellular agriculture? How could it transform food systems?
• [58:48] – Cultivated meat for pets and implications for vegan consumers.
• [60:15] – Treating animals as workers—models for cultivated meat.
• [64:52] – Practical example: egg-laying chickens as protected workers.
• [70:51] – Implications for activism in light of the book’s arguments.
• [73:43] – Milburn’s current and future projects.

---

Conclusion

This episode offers a comprehensive and provocative exploration of what an animal rights–respecting future for human food systems could look like. Dr. Milburn emphasizes the importance of nuanced, pluralist, and pragmatic approaches, challenging the assumption that veganism alone is the sharpest expression of justice for animals. With deep dives into the distinctions between justice and morality, the potential of new technologies like cellular agriculture, and the complexities of sentience, the conversation provides fresh “food for thought” for ethicists, activists, and all who care about animals and our shared future.

---

Transcript

[Commercial Narrator]

New Maybelline Serum lipstick. Maybe it's not just lipstick, it's lush color with endless possibilities. It's serum infused with a hyaluronic acid and oil blend for 8 hour. Plumping moisture in tone, enhancing shades. It's more than the shade, it's who's wearing it. You. New Maybelline Serum Lipstick. Maybe it's Maybelline.

A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The colonel made his $10 Tuesday bucket so full with eight pieces of juicy crispy chicken or tenders that it might just last you till Wednesday if you've got that kind of self control. I mean some people want leftovers, others are more into right nowers. The Colonel lived so we could chicken. 10 bucks, 8 pieces. One big deal with KFC. $10 Tuesdays.

[Kyle Johansen]

Prices and participation may vary. Taxes, tips and fees extra.

[Commercial Narrator]

Don't chew on that.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Max Cooper loves that chew too.

[Commercial Narrator]

Oh, now he's into Cooper's food. Wow, he is loving it. What do you feed Cooper?

[Kyle Johansen]

Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula. He never leaves a crumb. I love it because it's made with high quality protein, nutrient rich fruits and veggies and wholesome whole grains.

[Commercial Narrator]

Looks like we're switching to blue Blue Buffalo foods are made with the superior ingredients your dog needs to thrive.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Can your dog food say that?

[Commercial Narrator]

Visit feedbluefood.com to learn more.

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Kyle Johansen]

Hi everyone and welcome back to the New Books Network Animal Studies Channel. My name is Kyle Johansen and I'm a host on this channel. Today I'm very happy to be interviewing Dr. Josh Milburn. Josh is a lecturer in political philosophy at Loughborough University, as well as the host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals. Today we're going to be discussing his book, Food, justice and Feeding the World. Respectfully, this book was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. Welcome to the podcast, Josh.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Hi, Kyle. Thanks so much for having me.

[Kyle Johansen]

Yeah, it's great to have you. And actually we're having you for the second time now. This is the second time I'm going to be interviewing you for the New Books Network. But we shouldn't assume that listeners have heard the first interview or that they necessarily know about you. So I was hoping that you would. For the listeners who haven't heard of you, I was hoping you'd tell us a bit about yourself, such as where you're from or what topics you work on.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Absolutely. Well, I'm a philosopher. My background is very much in moral and political philosophy, though I sometimes dabble in other areas, and almost all of my work is about animals in one way or another. So my first book was called Just the Ethics of Feeding Animals and that was published in 2022 by McGill, Queen's University Press. And as you say, you interviewed me previously about that. So anyone who's interested in the topic of feeding animals, I do encourage you to go back and have a listen to that episode. And then my second book, which we'll be talking about today, is Food justice and Animals Feeding the World. Respectfully. So as that suggests, food is very much an area I'm interested in and questions about food ethics and food politics and where animals fit into that. But I've also written about animals in a range of other areas of moral, political and legal philosophy. So for example, around animals and property rights, around animals and hate speech, questions about wild animals, which of course is a real topic of interest for you personally, Kyle, and. And so on and so forth, as you say. I'm currently working as a lecturer in political philosophy at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. Some people might not have heard of Loughborough University. We don't actually have a philosophy department. I'm in the politics department, or more strictly the International Studies, Politics and History division. And as you say, I'm the host of the Knowing. Sorry. And as you say, I'm host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals, which is quite similar to this podcast in that I interview animal studies scholars about their work, and that's across philosophy, politics, social sciences, humanities, a whole range of different disciplines.

[Kyle Johansen]

Right, okay, yeah. And I'm a big fan of Knowing Animals. I imagine that a lot of this channel's listeners are familiar with the podcast. It's not that different from the new Books in Animal Studies podcast, I suppose, except that you interview people about a wider array of things. Sometimes you interview people about just an article, and other times I think occasionally you interview activists about the kind of work they're doing. Is that right?

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, that's correct. So often it is just published papers, single peer reviewed articles, single chapters in scholarly books. And they can make for really interesting conversations because you can really drill down into the specifics of the argument in a way that can be quite difficult if you're talking about 120,000 word monograph or something. And you're quite right that we also have a sister podcast called Protecting Animals which focuses on conversations with with animal activists of various kinds. For the most part we are focusing on academics and when we do interview activists, we're often interested in the questions about the relationships between their Activist work and scholarly work. For example, if I'm interviewing someone who is working for a big animal organization, I'll ask them about what role academic research has in the kinds of policies or the kinds of agendas or strategies that that institution is using or taking or making or so on, and the kind of work that they do with academics. But yeah, we've got a great listenership that stretches across the kind of activist, journalist, academic, student, the full range. And yeah, we do interpret academic quite broadly. So sometimes we'll interview people who are doing scholarly research work and publishing academic work of various kinds, but not necessarily people who are studying for a PhD or working as professors or lecturers at universities.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay, right. Well, let's move on to talk about your book. Why did you decide to write this book?

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, it's a good question. And I think as we get on to some of the specifics of the book, I think some people might genuinely think, well, why on earth would you write this? But I suppose part of it takes me back to when I first started reading about animals and animal rights and animal ethics. So I encountered animal ethics actually just before I started at university, when I was reading around the topic of philosophy. And I was, like a lot of people, I encountered this work and I was encouraged to change my life. Right. I was encouraged to switch initially to vegetarianism and then a little bit later to veganism. And I admit it took me longer than it should have done to get to be a vegan partner, because I'd never met a vegan before. So when I'd gone vegan, I started to drill down into the kinds of arguments that you come across again and again and again challenging veganism. And a lot of these arguments are just not particular, particularly compelling. They're based upon empirical confusions or they're based upon kind of moral or logical confusions. But then occasionally you come across, or I'd come across an article or an argument or just an aside that seemed to suggest something really interesting, seemed to suggest a really interesting way around this. The arguments for veganism. And these were the kinds of arguments against veganism that said something like, well, well, what if we could produce such and such an animal product in a way that would not cause any harm to animals? And I thought, right, that's interesting. If we're going to stick up for veganism, these are the kinds of arguments that we really need to engage with. So I spent a lot of time thinking about them and I published a few papers addressing these kinds of questions over a few years. You know, during my PhD and just after the PhD, but that leads to a second kind of area of literature which was a very important kind of foundation for this project. My PhD project was called the Political Turn in Animal Ethics. It wasn't really about food at all. What I was interested in was this emerging literature, well at the time emerging, now, quite well established, that says, what does it mean to include animals in political philosophy? Philosophers and others who think about animals are very familiar with questions about moral philosophy in animals, questions about individual relationships with animals. But this new literature, typified by, for example, Sue Donaldson and Will Kimlich, his 2011 book A Political Theory of Animal Rights, says, how do we include animals in our states, in our societies, in our legal systems? Where do animals fit into the traditions and concepts familiar to political philosophers? And I read a lot of work in this area, naturally, because I was writing a PhD on the subject. And I was always intrigued by these sketches, sometimes very detailed, sometimes very loose, of what a future just relationship with animals might look like. And part of the reason that I was really interested in these sketches was because it was sometimes unclear what this meant for food and food systems. So, for example, there are some pictures of a future human animal relationship, for example, abolitionist pictures of a future animal relationship that are very clear. It's vegan, it's a vegan future. In fact, it might be a future with very little interaction between humans and animals at all. But then there are others, and I think Sue Donaldson and Will Kimlich's work fits into this category where it sounds quite vegan, but at the same time there seems to be little gaps, little spaces where maybe there's some room for animal products or some room for non vegan diets. So what this book, what this project that I have put together, what Food, justice and Animals is all about, is basically bringing together these two questions, these two concerns, on the one hand, really rigorously, deeply exploring these ethics edge cases, these seeming counter examples to veganism, where a case for animal rights does not seem to entail a fully vegan diet, and on the other hand, trying to envision what a food system for this future state in which humans and animals live in peace would be. And crucially, therefore, trying to offer a slightly different vision of a future human animal relationship than an abolitionist future, even though I'm offering an animal rights future.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay, great. Well, so you've kind of touched on the question that I want to ask next because maybe partially answered it, but I think it's still worth asking. So your book is critical of veganism but it's critical in a very specific way. So you argue that an ideally just society would opt for a non vegan food system. I was hoping you would explain this claim and the sense in which it challenges veganism. And I was also hoping that maybe you would explain some of the ways in which your book does not challenge veganism.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, I think that's a great question and it's an absolutely crucial question because I think it will be so easy to misunderstand what I'm doing here. So the first thing to say is that this is a book that comes from an animal rights perspective. So the last thing you're going to find here is some kind of argument that animals don't matter or that the suffering they face in the food system shouldn' really concern us. Very much the opposite. Right. And the second thing to know is that I am myself vegan, so I'm certainly not anti vegan. That said, the first chapter is called the Trouble with Veganism and what I mean there is the trouble with a vegan food system and very specifically reasons that we might be ready to challenge or we should be ready to challenge or at least questions that we might raise about a vegan food system. So what I am not doing or what I'm. Well, what I'm doing is I'm saying that a vegan food system is not a panacea. It's not going to solve all of our problems or it's not immediately clear that it will. There are questions that we should raise about a vegan food system. And of course what I'm trying to do there is. I'm trying to think about this from an animal rights perspective. So from an animal rights perspective there are questions that we should ask about a vegan food system. But what that doesn't mean to stress again is that there's necessarily anything wrong with us being vegan here and now. I think there's lots of very good reasons for us to be vegan here and now. It doesn't necessarily mean that there wouldn't be vegans in the future. There might be a great many vegans in the future. What I'm saying is that an animal rights respecting state should allow and perhaps even support and encourage some non vegan elements of a future food system. And it's also worth saying what I understand by veganism here because I think sometimes people will use the word vegan in slightly different ways. When I'm talking about veganism, I'm talking about food or diet or a food system that is free of animal products. So let me give an example that we might get into in a little bit more detail later. Let's imagine that oysters aren't sentient. Okay, That's a contentious claim, I appreciate, but let's imagine for the sake of argument that oysters aren't sentient. If they're not sentient, then they don't have rights. And if they don't have rights, then there's no in principle reason that we shouldn't eat them. So I would say from an animal rights perspective, there's not particularly any reason to be worried about the consumption of oysters, just as there isn't particularly any reason to be worried about the consumption of carrots. And I'm here assuming that carrots aren't sentient. However, that doesn't mean it will be vegan. Right? So some people might want to use the word vegan to mean something like a diet consistent with animal rights. And in that case, a vegan diet could be a diet that contains an awful of animal products insofar as those animal products could be compatible with animal rights. From my own perspective, I'm talking about a vegan diet as kind of synonymous with a plant based diet, that is a diet which contains non animal products. And what I'm interested in doing is showing that there might actually be a gap between a commitment to animal rights and a commitment to veganism. And when those are intentioned, my commitment is to animal rights, not to veganism.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay, right. That's interesting. I think this comes out in the book and it also came out a little bit in your answer. But it seems to me that what your book does is it kind of flips the relationship between veganism and idealism that most people think is the right relationship. So I think that most animal activists understand both veganism and the abolition of animal agriculture as ideals of sorts of. So there's lots of animal activists who would acknowledge that there may be good reason to advocate for something less than veganism or to advocate for something less than abolition. But normally they'd say those reasons are just pragmatic reasons and that if we could, if it were perfectly feasible, it would be best to just move straight towards abolition. But I think you're kind of flipping things here. So for you, a non vegan food system is actually the ideal, whereas veganism probably, we should probably say that it belongs to something like non ideal theory. Because veganism though, it makes a lot of sense. It makes sense specifically because we're currently in non ideal circumstances where our food system fails to offer rights respecting animal products. Is that the right way to understand your book? That you're just flipping the sort of conventional understanding of the relationship between idealism and veganism?

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. So this is a book of ideal theory and this distinction between ideal and non ideal theory is something that I borrow from political philosophy. And in fact, the political philosopher Robert Garner has said that this ideal, non ideal distinction is the most important thing that political philosophy can add to conversations about animal ethics. My defense of a non vegan food system, you're quite right, does not come from this non ideal pragmatic perspective. Happy to have that conversation. And I think actually my own sympathies are a little bit against that. And I do think we probably should be campaigning for veganism here and now rather than campaigning for, you know, improved animal welfare or something like that. But I do think that there are principled reasons to be a little bit worried about veganism. And therefore the ideal that we're aiming for should be, or perhaps at least could be, but I think should be a non vegan system. But this is a non vegan system that is very, very far removed from the non vegan system that we currently have. So I absolutely support abolishing animal agriculture as we understand it, as we typically imagine it. I'm envisaging a future without slaughterhouses, right? I'm talking about a meat industry that may involve animals in some minimal way, but certainly doesn't involve killing animals, doesn't involve closely confining animals, doesn't involve mutilating animals. And you might think, how can we come to get that right? And that's one of the exciting things about where we are in the kind of current history of agriculture, right? Because there are a lot of options on the table right now which move us in a very different direction to where we might imagine we're going. So we might think, right, well, we've got a future in which case in which we either switch to a kind of fully plant based system or almost entirely plant based system, or we continue to intensify our use of animals in animal agriculture, or perhaps we switch to a kind of regenerative farm farming model. Now, of those three, I'm absolutely with the vegans, right? I'm absolutely saying we should switch to a fully plant based system. But I think there's another option, right? And the other option is we start to really think about in what ways we can work with animals to produce foods and animal based foods. And those gaps are to Kind of lay them out on the table. Number one, there are some animals who might be non sentient or who are non sentient and they are not the kind of animals who have rights and so they can be exploited freely. Okay. Number two, we can produce animal products or things that are very, very close to animal products using plants. Right. We're getting much better at producing plant based meats, milk, eggs, honey, etc. That can fool even very committed, very experienced meat eaters. Number three, we've got cellular agriculture, which can not just create, quote, unquote, animal products using plants, but can actually replicate animal products on a molecular level. Right. So in principle, you know, looking through a microscope at a product of cellular agriculture like say cultivated meat and looking at the corpse of an animal, there's going to be very, very little difference in principle. And then number four, perhaps the most speculative part of the book, and this, this draws very strongly from this kind of political future of co living with animals. We could try to imagine ways that we could work with animals to produce animal products in ways that are genuinely respectful of them. For example, there's been a recent movement towards thinking about animals as workers, protecting them with workers rights. If we could think about animals as workers in say, a courthouse therapy dog as an example, that might seem like something that seems to respect this dog's rights. And if they get the appropriate protections, there's nothing too much wrong with that. Unless we're abolitionists and we think that we shouldn't be using animals for any purpose whatsoever. And I'm inclined to think, well, perhaps we could imagine something somewhat analogous in farming. Right. Of course this is going to be slaughter free farming, but maybe we could imagine something like an egg farm in which chickens are protected with genuine workers rights. And then we can have eggs as part of the food system and we can have animals as a part of the food system, but not exploited in the food system in the way that they are today.

[Kyle Johansen]

Right.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

So this future vision of a non vegan food system, I hope it's clear from that sketch and no doubt we'll drill down in some of the details over the next couple of questions. But I hope it's clear from that sketch that this is very far removed from our current food system. And so although I am flipping things on the head to a certain extent, that isn't to say that I think that we should be aiming for a future anything like the one we have right now. Because let's be clear, we're killing trillions of animals a year and those animals are suffering horrendously. And it's kind of one of the worst things that we're doing. And I think it's one of the most pressing injustices in the world, Perhaps even the most pressing injustice in the world. And we have to do something about it. And what I'm offering here is just a slightly different vision of what it means to do something about it.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay. Yeah, thanks, Josh. And yeah, I think having different vision, having different visions on the table, or different ideas of what an ideal food system would look like is really useful. Because it's hard to know in isolation what the ideal food system would be if we only have one option. And all we're doing is comparing it to what we currently have. So we're just comparing abolitionism to what we currently have. Yeah, that's a fairly. That's not a lot of food for thought. One of the things about political philosophy is that ideals of justice are supposed to be assessed comparatively. We have more than one ideal on the table, and then we compare them to each other. So we need, I think in order to have a really good sense of what food system we need to aim at, we should have multiple reasonable options, and we should be comparing those reasonable options to each other, not just have one reasonable option and one unreasonable option.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Absolutely. And the other thing is that we kind of need to do this work or it has a certain intellectual priority compared to the kind of activist work, because there's a sense in which we can say, oh, the current system is terrible, let's go and change it. But without a very clear idea of what we should be aiming for, we can end up in kind of real conflict and real uncertainty about how to change the current system. Now, I'm not saying, of course, that if we adopt my vision rather than abolitionist vision, that's going to obviously lead to XYZ kind of activism. I'm not of that belief. It needs further work. Right. And that's why we have both ideal theory and non ideal theory. But we can't really do rigorous non ideal theory. At least this is what John Rawls, the great political philosopher of the 20th century, who kind of really is responsible for the current popularity of this ideal, non ideal theory distinction. This is. That's what he thinks. We can't really do rigorous non ideal theory without having done some ideal theory first. We don't know. If we don't know where we're going, we can't have a very good conversation about how to get there.

[Kyle Johansen]

Right. Yeah. Okay, good. So in many parts of your book, you argue that a non vegan food system, so long as it also manages to be respectful of animal rights, is more desirable than a vegan food system specifically, or at least this is one of the reasons, because it better accommodates the reasonable pluralism that we find in liberal democracies, specifically plurality among citizens conceptions of the good. I was hoping that you would give us some examples of how a non vegan food system is more accommodating than a vegan food system as well as I was also hoping that you would explain why you think it's important for food systems to accommodate citizens conceptions of the good.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, great question. So let me just preempt the answer with two clarifications. The first is, as you quite rightly say, this is one of the sets of concerns that I have about vegan food systems. It's not the only one. And the second thing to say is the kinds of things I'm about to describe don't justify violating animals rights. This is an argument for a rights respecting non vegan food system. I am not saying that because what I'm about to say is the case. We can go out and kill animals. So those two kind of caveats aside, each of us as part of the human condition has a very different idea about what it means to live a good meaningful life. And one of the great insights of the liberal tradition of political thought and political philosophy, and that's the tradition with which I align myself, is that it's not the place of the state to dictate to people which answer to what it means to live a good or meaningful life is the correct one. Okay, so if you take a kind of old fashioned sort of Catholic theology vision of the state, the state is there to say this is how you live a good life. And if you disagree with that, you're just wrong. And we're going to help you live a good life. Right. The liberal typically and liberalism as I understand it, does not do that. Instead it says we all have different ideas about how to live a good life and it's up to you to try and find that. And the state is going to help you a little bit. It's going to protect you from people interfering with your pursuit of the good life. But the state is not there to help to make you realize the good life. That's up to you. So what is the relationship between the good life and meat eating or the eating of animal products? Well, for some people there's going to be no relationship. Okay, I fully accept that there are going to be lots of people out there, probably, you know, vegans and vegetarians for the most part, who are going to say, well, it doesn't matter. My, my understanding of the good life is gardening or it's, it's walking my dog or it's, you know, working as a university lecturer, right? And I can do these things perfectly fine without any animal products in the food system. And that's fine, but for lots of people, and I don't think these people are eccentrics, they are going to have understandings of what it means to live a good life which are tied up with animal products in various ways. So let me just give a handful of examples. For lots of people, eating animal products is going to be integral to the kinds of relationships they have with others. Okay? A favourite meal or restaurant with a loved one, or a culturally important meal with your family. Think of Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner or Passover or something like that. And of course Passover has this added element of the religious element to what's going on there. Same with Christmas dinner. And you know, religion is central to people's lives and people's particular religious understandings will sometimes involve the consumption of animal products. Think too of the foodie, right? The person who finds good, meaningful experiences in the kind of heights of aesthetic experience that are open to them through eating what they deem to be good food. Think of the kind of work that people have with food. Think of the patisserie chef, someone who perfects their craft and who finds life defining, meaning giving work, working with gelatin, eggs, milk to produce cakes, pastries, etc. What I think when it comes to these conceptions of the good life is that every time we cut off someone's route to their good life without a very good reason, that's a tragedy. And even when we cut it off with a very good reason, that too is a tragedy. So given that there are many reasonable, decent people all around us, I'm sure all of us have met people like this. In fact, many people listening to this might be someone like that. Given that there are all these people who find good, meaningful life defining experiences or work or whatever it might be with working with or dealing with or eating animal products or even producing animal products, that would give us a very good reason to say it'd be great if we could continue to have access to these even in an animal rights respecting future. And so if, if big if, if we could identify an animal rights respecting future in which those things continue to be accessible to these individuals who find such importance in them. That would be better than a future in which those opportunities were cut off. So good, so good, so good.

[Commercial Narrator]

New spring arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up to 60% off rag and bone. Marc Jacobs, free people and more.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

How did I not know rack has Adidas?

[Kyle Johansen]

Cause there's always something new.

[Commercial Narrator]

Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack Drippin in gold. That's cool. Dripping in Velveeta's supremely creamy golden cheesiness. That's respect. Elevate your drip with Velveeta's range of outrageously delicious dips and dishes, shells, cheese, melty blocks and heat and eat queso that go all in on indulgence. Flex on your fam with a creamy cheesy masterpiece and go all in on what you love with Velveeta. Respect the drip and satisfy your cravings. Bring home the drip with Velveeta.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay? Yeah. Thanks, Josh. All that sounds plausible to me. I want to dwell a little bit on this question about reasonable pluralism and the desirability of accommodating it, because I think there's something interesting here that could be uncovered. And I don't know, maybe this interview is not the best place to do that, but I'm going to dwell for a little bit anyways. So one thing that struck me when I was reading through these sorts of arguments in the book was that first, I think it's kind of important that you be able to say that the conceptions of the good you're talking about are in fact reasonable conceptions of the good rather than unreasonable ones. Because you, I mean, and this is important just to your conception, your own conception of what it is that you're doing. So you're envisioning an ideally just society with a just food system. You're doing ideal theory. If you're going to be using arguments about accommodating conceptions of the good and also say that you're doing ideal theory, I think it's important that we be able to say these conceptions of the good are reasonable, because if they were unreasonable and we're still talking about accommodating them, then we're probably not doing ideal theory anymore. We're doing some kind of non ideal theory where we're trying to work out political compromises for the sake of feasibility or something like that. So that was One thing that occurred to me, but another thing that occurred to me is that probably some of the people who might read this book, certain vegans and certain animal activists, animal studies scholars, they're probably going to read these sorts of arguments and have a negative reaction to them. And if they were to use the language of liberal political philosophy to describe their negative reaction, it would probably just be that they disagree that these conceptions of the good are reasonable. They'd say something like acting on these conceptions of the good involves or contributes to rights violations and therefore they're not reasonable, or something like that. I could pause there and just ask you for your response, but I think there's something worth digging up here, something like a distinction between. And this is going to deviate from your book a bit. But I mean, one way of responding to this sort of criticism would be to try and come up with an argument for why these, these conceptions of the good are in fact reasonable. So you could just respond that way. But another way of responding would be to say something like, okay, we need to distinguish between something like contingently unreasonable conceptions of the good and necessarily unreasonable conceptions of the good. And if we have a distinction like this in mind, we could say that when a conception of the good is contingently unreasonable in the sense that it's only unreasonable in certain social circumstances, the best way to handle such conceptions of the good, when we can, is to change the social circumstances so that those conceptions can be acted upon in a rights respecting way and thereby sort of make them reasonable by changing social circumstances. I thought this was. So I realized that all that was very complicated. But as I was reading your book, it occurred to me that maybe conceptions of the good aren't always just unreasonable or reasonable. Maybe in some circumstances they're unreasonable and then in other circumstances they would be reasonable. And I'm not sure if political philosophy has ever tried to make that kind of distinction before. It may be unique to sort of combining political philosophy with food ethics and animal rights theory and whatnot. Do you have any thoughts about any of this? I realized that it was all a little complicated.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

I have a lot of thoughts about this because I spent a lot of time grappling with exactly that question. And I think sometimes I am inclined to think, right, well, if you've got a conception of the good that involves harm to others, that's an unreasonable conception. But that doesn't seem to be true because let's be clear, almost all of our actions involve harm to others, right? So here's a very standard conception of the good. I love traveling the world to see wonderful beaches, right? But what do we do to travel the world? We get on planes, right? And that involves a lot of damage. Now that's not harm in necessarily the same sense. You know, philosophers make some really important distinction between different kinds of harmonies. Not necessarily harm in the same sense as, you know, killing an animal. However, I think you're exactly right that a lot of the kinds of conceptions of the good that currently happen to be tied up with the killing of animals are contingently tied up with the killing of animals. If the patisserie chef, for example, if his or her conception of the good life is tied up with using eggs milk gelatin, it doesn't necessarily matter to them whether the egg milk gelatin comes from a genuinely rights respecting way of production, if such a thing is possible. I think it is. And we can, we can talk about that or whether it comes from the current incredibly violent slaughter based methods that are used to acquire these things. Now you might then say, ah, well, there are going to be some conceptions of the good which still involve inherent violence. Okay, so we might think someone who enjoys shooting birds, okay? I then say, well, let's talk about clay pigeon shooting, let's talk about video games that allow them to use these, or virtual reality that allows them to engage in this hobby without actually killing any animals. Right, we can talk about that. But this person still might say, oh, it's just not the same. This is not realizing my conception of the good. My conception of the good actually involves blood and guts and bullets going into living, breathing things. And then part of me wants to, you know, say very nasty things to this person. Right? Another part of me, the more diplomatic part of me says, okay, so this person's conception of the good, despite our best efforts, remains incomplete, compatible with justice. And the most kind of conciliatory liberal inside me says something like, that's regrettable, that's a shame, it would be better if we could find some way to reconcile it. But then I return to that earlier caveat that I said. I don't think that people's conceptions of the good justify the violation of rights. All they do is they offer us a very good reason to try to find a rights respecting way for them to realise the things that are important to them. Right? It's very regrettable. I think, if people are not able to pursue the things that give their life genuine meaning, and I think we need a very, very good reason to say to them no, you cannot pursue that thing that gives your life genuine meaning. And I think that animal rights are a matter of justice. I think that's what it means to say that animals have rights. I think this is worth stressing, right? I'm not saying it'd be nice or good or virtuous for us to not kill animals. I'm saying it is unjust for us to kill animals. I'm saying the state or another collective actor of some kind should prevent us from killing animals. And if we continue to kill animals, we, you know, we warrant punishment or we warrant animals warrant some kind of protection from us. Of course, we can argue about, you know, carceral states or whatever it is, what role the state should actually have in this. But in the abstract, I'm saying if you think it's okay to kill animals and you actually act upon that, the state should step in and prevent you, whether that's through punishment, whether that's through protection of animals. So talking about animal rights as a matter of justice is a big deal. And I think that because I think of animal rights as justice, I think that is a sufficiently big deal to say to some people, yeah, I know this is what you think gives your life meaning. And you know, for all I know, you're right, that is what gives your life meaning. But that doesn't mean you can do it. But it does mean I'll do my best, or we collectively should do our best to find a way that you can continue to do something very like what you think gives your life meaning in a way that's more respectful.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay, thanks. Well, this talk of justice leads into my next question fairly well, I think so. In a number of places in the book, you draw a distinction between justice and what you call mere morality. And you note that your argument for a non vegan but rights respecting food system is mostly concerned with justice and, and not mere morality. I was hoping that you would explain this distinction to us, the distinction between justice and mere morality. And I was also wondering if you think that there are some ways in which a vegan food system is maybe better from the standpoint of mere morality, even if it isn't better from the standpoint of justice.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, these are great questions. So this moral, political or justice morality distinction is very important to this project. I'm quite influenced by a philosopher called Robert Nozick, and he has a very particular understanding of politics as protecting rights. And I should clarify for those who've heard of Nozick, that I'm not a Nozikian. I'M just influenced by his thought. You know, he has a lot of views that I quite strongly disagree with. But anyways, politics is for Nozick and for me, political philosophy is the theory of those particular kinds of duties that can be informed, forced. So the difference between violating a right and violating a different kind of moral duty is that others have to step in or have certain kinds of obligations to step in when you are violating a right. Okay, so here's an example I think I use in the book, Kyle. Let's say you and I are going out for a meal and you say, oh, I want that person's drink over there, I'm going to go and steal it off them and enjoy that drink. I would say, no, that is violating their property rights. You have no business doing that. I could step in myself or I could contact the authorities or tell the waiter or something like that. And that is the kind of political rights based, justice based side of things. If, on the other hand, you purchased the drink yourself, but you were proceeding to drink an awful lot of alcohol, and I happen to be someone who believed that the drinking of alcohol was immoral. I could tell you that I thought it was immoral. I could try and reason with you. I could even say, right, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna continue this meal with you, Kyle, I think you're behaving inappropriately. I'm going to leave. You know, those are all appropriate, but it would not be appropriate in that case because of the nature of the quote, unquote wrong, that is the excessive use of alcohol that I step in. That's not an injustice, that's not a rights violation. That is just a matter of so called mere morality. Now, it isn't necessarily the case that mere morality is trivial, right? Mere morality could be very central to our lives, could be very important issues, but it's not enforceable in the same way that a rights violation or injustice is.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay, Right. But now, so a further thought though, and maybe you were about to answer, but are there some ways in which a vegan food system is perhaps better from the standpoint of mere morality? Would you willing to concede that sort of thing?

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

It's possible. I'm not sure that morality is quite the right term to judge a food system, but I could certainly think of good or reasonable or sensible moral arguments against particular foods. And so, for example, I think that there would still be room for moral vegans in the kind of world I envisage. Okay, so a very easy example would be that I think that some shellfish are probably non sentient, but Jewish thinkers or Jewish vegans, or Jewish non vegans even might say, well, even if they're non sentient and they don't have rights, there's still a moral problem with eating them because of the particular commands in a particular religious tradition. Rastafarians and Jains might be other examples of people who will find particular rules, moral rules within their religion say that they should not eat certain kinds of food products. Right. And that would be completely consistent with them saying, well, there's nothing unjust, there's no injustice in me eating these things, but there is something morally questionable about it. Now I spend quite a lot, I don't spend much time in the book engaging with these kinds of religious arguments, but I do think that they're quite good examples. Part of the reason I don't spend much time engaging with them is because as you say, I'm interested in the justice of food systems. I'm interested in the kinds of things that the state should be enforcing, not enforcing, the kinds of things they should be supporting, not supporting, rather than questions about individual moral dietary choices. Again, that said, I do think that there are potentially some plausible vegan arguments that challenge the kinds of foods I'm open to. So for example, I suggest that there might be some chance for states to permit the production of animal based foods using animals that are almost certainly not sentient, but might be. There's a tiny chance that they're sentient. Right. That's how the state might appropriately, you know, work out that balance. On the other hand, individual vegans, individual animal activists, I think they very melt, very might well say, well, given the tiny chance that these animals are sentient, I'm not going to take the moral risk. I'm going to treat them as if they are sentient. And I think that it might be appropriate for individuals to behave quite differently to collectives precisely because when we're talking about individual morality, we're talking about people making choices for themselves and what they think is right. When we're talking about the state, we're talking about enforcing of views and that is a big bar, right? We are talking about tough men and women coming and saying to people, you can't do that thing and if you do do that thing, we're going to do something to you that you don't want to happen, you know, and that requires some quite serious justification.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay, great. Well, yeah, so let's talk about invertebrate animals then. The animals whose sentience is a little unclear or uncertain. So you have a chapter about invertebrate animals, and in that chapter you distinguish between animals who are probably sentient, animals who are plausibly sentient, and animals who are probably non sentient. I was hoping that you would explain the significance of this trichotomy for the food system that you envision.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yes, I think the first thing we need to do is be clear about what I mean by sentience. And I actually spend a bit of time kind of mapping these different concepts of sentience that get used in animal rights literature and adjacent literatures in animal law and animal welfare science and so forth. I mean roughly, and this is slightly technical, but I mean roughly something like the capacity for negatively and positively valenced experiences. And that's not quite the same as saying the capacity for suffering. What it means is that there's somebody home. There's something that it's like to be the animal in question or the being in question, the entity in question. And there is a loose sense, a rough sense in which they care about what happens to them. Okay, now, as best as I understand it, every vertebrate animal comfortably passes the test, the best test that we have for this. But so let's be clear that we're talking about tests here. We do not have access to the minds of others. We cannot tell what others are perceiving. And that's a problem when it comes to inter human interactions as much as it's a problem when we're talking about cross species comparisons and interactions. But I have every reason. I'm looking out of my window right now, I can see some birds, some trees and on roofs. I have every reason to think there's something that it's like to be them and that they care. Okay, if the, if the wind is too high or the sun is too hot, they are experiencing negative things. If they're eating delicious seeds, they are experiencing positive things. As we start to talk about animals with comparatively simple behaviours or comparatively simple nervous systems, or comparatively simple minds insofar as they have minds, it can be much harder to be sure about what we're talking about here. And when I talk about invertebrates, of course I'm talking about a vast, vast, vast array of different animals. Octopuses and I think crabs, lobsters, shrimp, prawns, these are all animals who I think the best science at the moment strongly suggests are sentient. So they get rights, they are protected. I am certainly not an advocate of octopus farming. They're a kind of easy case. I'm not saying that science is Easy, but ethically they're quite an easy case. And then the other easy case are those animals who are almost certainly not sentient. And in that category I will put. Jellyfish are a nice clear example from the invertebrate welfare literature. They come up again and again. They are edible, although they're not necessarily that popular in the UK or Canada where you and I live. But you know, they're very much eaten in Korea, in China, in Japan, in Thailand, in a number of countries in the so called east. But I also include, for example, oysters. I think the science at the moment, on my reading of the science, and of course, of course this isn't, this isn't, I shouldn't be the, the ultimate arbiter of this. I'm a political philosopher, not an animal welfare scientist. But on my reading of the science, we have very little reason to believe that these animals are sentient. And so they are kind of fair game as far as these things go. We should not be preventing people from eating these, should not be preventing people from gathering these, should not be preventing them from farming these animals. Or if we should, it's not for the sake of the animals themselves. But that leaves a third category, and that's the really difficult one, which is those animals who are probably not sentient, right? But there's at least some chance that they are. Now I put insects in this category and, or I did when I wrote the book. And I think that a lot of people have already challenged me and said that actually the science on insect sentience is rapidly advancing. And I don't deny that, I don't deny that the, the literature is rapidly advancing here and insects were just meant to be a kind of an example. Again, I don't want to make definitive claims about which animals are and are not sentient. That's not my role. But what I can do is I can identify the kind of conceptual category which is this middle category. And I think this middle category are really, really quite tricky because on the one hand, we don't want to risk allowing practices that will cause serious harms and rights violations to these animals. And let's be clear, we're talking about harms and rights violations that would occur if we farmed these animals and they were sentient, right? So it's not just a case of saying, well, if they're sentient, we farm them. If they're not sent, sorry, if they're sentient, we don't farm them. If they're not sentient, we can farm them. We just don't know. Right. But then on the flip side, we need to recognize that there are harms involved in attributing sentience to these animals when they are not sentient.

[Kyle Johansen]

Right.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Again, we're talking about the state saying to people, you can't do this thing that is important for your livelihood, important for your hobbies or passions, that is important for you culturally. Right. Or similar. And that's a big ask. And we need to be very sure before we allow the state or endorse the state engaging these kinds of activities. So in that chapter, I spend a lot of time trying to work out what kind of middle ground we might have. And I'll spare listeners the very technical arguments that I run through. But the proposal I come to in the end, and let me be clear, this is just a proposal. The proposal I come to in the end is that we should protect them with one key right? And that is the right to not have suffering inflicted upon them. Or more precisely, we should give them a legal right to protection from those treatments that our best estimates suggest would lead to them suffering. Because there's so much uncertainty with these animals. That's the whole reason that they are a complicated case.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay, Right. And wait, so with respect to this category of plausibly sentient animals or animals who are could be sentient and the chance is non negligible, whatever word we want to use, I think one concept that was important in your chapter on this was psychological continuity. So, yeah, it struck me that there was this. I mean, sentience was the main concept you were working with. And you talk about how we have degrees of uncertainty with respect to sentience attributions. But then you also introduce psychological continuity. And you note that with respect to plausibly sentient animals in particular, you think that they probably don't possess a high level of psychological continuity such that they probably don't have something like a stable identity over time. And as a result. So it would still make sense to refrain from causing them suffering, if they're even capable of suffering. But it would make less sense to worry too much about whether they painlessly die because they're not really connected to any future projects that they might have or future interests that they might have in the future. They might not even be, in a sort of metaphysical sense, they might not even be the same being in the future. And so it's hard. It's harder. It'd be harder to ground something like a right to life for animals like this. I'm just wondering if you wanted to say a bit about that in particular, it just struck me that this is a pretty different concept from sentience. And probably it also admits of degrees of uncertainty. Like we could talk about some animals who are, may probably, probably have a high level of psychological continuity, other animals that probably don't, and some animals who maybe plausibly have psychological continuity, but we're not sure. It just seems like a third dimension that we could map onto the sentience dimension and say a lot of the same things about it.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think for me, sentience gets one into the category of rights bearers. But then we need to do further work to identify the kinds of rights that that particular being has. And that depends, among other things on the actual interests that they have. And so what I'm doing in that section is I'm saying that even if these animals are sentient, it's at least possible that they have a much lower interest in continued life than do other animals. Or more precisely, more importantly, perhaps they have a much lower interest in continued life than they have an interest in avoiding suffering. You're right. I'm kind of running a precautionary principle slightly differently with regards to those two capacities. Right. And so I'm saying we have a high enough bar, a high enough chance that these animals are sentient, and we need to be aware of sentience. We need to be sufficiently aware of sentience in that case, given the amount of harm that will be caused compared to. We don't have that higher bar to worry about their interest in continued life if they do have an interest in continued life. And I don't think, by the way, that psychological continuity is the only thing that matters when it comes to an interest in continued life. But if you do have an interest in continued life, it's not going to be massively important to them. And that's crucial to them. When we're talking about interests, we're talking about the interest to the being themselves. And I think that if we're talking about a psychologically very unsophisticated animal, it might be the case that it's much, much, much worse for them to inflict suffering upon them than it is to kill them. That doesn't necessarily mean it's okay to kill them, but it does mean that when we're dealing with these incredible uncertainties, we might draw the line in a slightly different way.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay, thanks. Well, let's. Let's move on. So you discussed cellular agriculture in a couple of chapters in the book, and you argue that it has the Potential to overcome some of the problems that a vegan food system would face. I was hoping you would just explain what cellular agriculture is and also why you think it ought to be included in an ideally just food system.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah. Cellular agriculture is a term that's used to refer to an array of different technologies at different levels of development which produce animal products or indeed other products at the cellular rather than the organism level, Rather than growing a whole cow because we want some milk or some meat or some leather. What cellular agriculture lets us do is grow the meat at the cellular level, draw the leather at the cellular level, or produce milk proteins at the cellular level using yeast, for example. What's crucial about cellular agriculture compared to, say, plant based meat or plant based milks, which many people might be familiar with, think about like veggie burgers or soy or oat milks, is that they are producing actual animal products or what are materially animal products. And we can argue about the nature of meat and milk metaphysically, whether this is meat, whether this is milk. But the point is that because it is chemically very close to meat or milk, it has many of the same properties, okay? It has the same kind of textures, it has the same kinds of tastes, it cooks in the same kind of way. So if that is what is important to you about meat or milk or eggs, as it might be for the patisserie chef or the person who, you know, enjoys a barbecue with their family and for whom barbecuing is central to their relationship with their family, the kinds of good life conversations we were talking about before, Cellular agriculture could in principle, produce products that are able to replicate that almost exactly, you know, from the perspective of the consumer, from the perspective of the cook, the eater, whatever, these products are basically the same. Now, some products of cellular agriculture are at the moment mostly hypothetical, right? So cultivated meat has attracted a lot of press attention. I'm sure lots of listeners are familiar with it. Right now it's available, it's for sale in Singapore. It's available or not for sale in Israel. It's been sort of half approved in the United States, but it's not yet available for sale. So, you know, it's coming, but it's been coming for quite a while. So I forgive skepticism among some listeners on this point. Other products are here much more readily. So any listeners in the United States will be able to order ice cream, for example, made with real milk proteins that were never inside a cow. And similarly, actually European consumers, this same basic technology has been in use for decades. Anybody who's reliant upon insulin. Insulin was once sourced from dead pigs. It's now mostly produced biochemically. Okay. Chemically, it's the same thing. In fact, it's a bit safer if we produce it biochemically using what is now called cellular agricultural technology. But we now produce it without the need for the killing of animals. And you know, it's not the case that insulin users are horrified about this. I think, if anything, probably quite the opposite. And you know, insulin is not the only product. So cellular agriculture is here. It's not necessarily something that we're all familiar with under that name, but many of us will have actually used the products of cellular agriculture without realizing it. And I'd like to imagine that in the future almost. Well, I'll say, yeah. Almost all of the animal products that we currently have, whether that's for clothing, whether that's for food, whether that's for cosmetics, whatever it might be, we will be able to produce using this kind of technology. That's a kind of very optimistic vision, I accept. But if that was the case, then there's a sense in which we could switch over to an animal rights respecting system insofar as this system does, insofar as southern agriculture does respect animal rights. And you know, over several chapters I explore a number of counter arguments to that claim and find them wanting. But we could have an animal rights respecting system where we end up in a situation where from the consumer's perspective, from the ordinary person's perspective, they can still have their leather shoes, they can still have their beef burger, they can still have their milky coffee.

[Kyle Johansen]

Right.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

It's just that these products are produced in a slightly different way.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay, Right. And I know you don't focus on this as much in the current book, you focused on it more in your previous book, Just Fodder. But one really interesting thing about cellular agriculture is that not only could it produce meat and dairy and whatnot for human beings that might be interested in those things, but it could also be used to produce meat, dairy and whatever else for animals who are interested in eating those things. So obligate carnivores such as cats would presumably benefit from the availability of rights respecting cat food. Rights respecting cat food that includes meat in it. I mean, maybe it's just worth mentioning this sort of argument here, this sort of consideration here, in part because I think that it's something that vegans and animal activists can be really excited about. Maybe vegans and animal activists will not. We'll be a little lukewarm about Accommodating the various conceptions of the good that you're interested in accommodating in your book. But I think most of them can get really excited about the idea that we can feed wholesome food to, say, rescue cats and whatnot without violating any rights in the process. That sounds really wonderful, right?

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Absolutely. And it's interesting. I've actually done some. I've been involved in an empirical research project on this with my co authors Basha Yochsun and Alice Oven. And what we found in that study was that while it is the case, and this is quite well documented, that vegans and vegetarians aren't particularly interested in purchasing cultivated meat for themselves, they are very interested or potentially interested in purchasing cultivated meat for their companion animals. And so we think that the market for cultivated meat as pet food could actually be quite different to the market for cultivated meat meat as human food. Though, of course, given that that's, given the kind of work that is, that's a much more kind of non ideal perspective that I'm taking here. But you're quite right that in the envisioned future that I'm offering in this book, and in just fodder, we could continue to feed meat to companion animals, but we could produce that meat in genuinely respectful ways.

[Kyle Johansen]

Yeah. Okay, well, sticking with cellular agriculture here. So with. But with respect to cultivated meat in particular, which is a particular kind of cellular agriculture, you discussed three possible ways that cultivated meat could be incorporated into a food system. And you argue that the best way is for the animals involved in the production of that meat to be treated as workers. I was hoping that you would explain your argument to us and also say a bit about what it would mean to treat animals as rights bearing workers.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, well, I think the three ways that I talk about. So they are the pig in the backyard model, they're the mail order sales model, and the animal worker model. The reason I'm exploring these is that cultivated meat, as the technology currently exists, continues to need some minimal animal input. Basically, very basically, we need cells from animals that we can then grow into meat. Okay. There are some animals or some meats that we can produce via immortal cell lines. Okay. And so that means that we don't actually need to have those, those living animals continue. Now, for example, you know, slightly different thing, but the cultivated milk that I was talking about just a few seconds ago, that can be produced without any bovine input, right? We have the technology, we have the data, we have the information. If every cow mysteriously exploded tomorrow, we could continue to produce milk. We couldn't continue to produce cultivated beef. So the question then becomes, some vegans, I think, want to say, well, because we still need that animal input, there's still the chance for abuse of animals. And I absolutely agree. And so what I'm interested in doing is exploring how we could remove that chance for abuse or minimise that chance for abuse. The pig in the backyard model is something that's been quite. It's caused quite a stir in the cultivated meat literature and the nascent industry. And this is the idea that we could have animals who live with us like companions, and we occasionally take a few cells and use a kind of nifty kitchen gadget to produce meat. I don't know how useful that's going to be as the basis of a food system, although it could be something that could be permissible in the kind of state I envisage. And let me be clear, I think that all three of these could be permissible. These are kind of three pillars or three possible pillars of the system I envisage. The second is the mail order cells model in which the animal is effectively removed and we rely upon immortal cell lines or something like them. Now, I actually worry about this because I think that one of the reasons we have to be worried about a vegan food system, and I didn't talk about this earlier, but I do talk about in the book, is that it removes animals entirely. And so we get this strange, almost paradoxical situation whereby we liberate animals by making them extinct. Right? And there's something quite curious about that. And I think there's reasons to resist that if we want to liberate animals and find them a place in our soc. So that leads me to the third model, which is the animal worker model. And this very explicitly finds a place for these animals, these chickens, these pigs, these goats, these cows, etc. It says, yes, we have a home for you, and it's a home. That's a kind of space that you will flourish in. And it's something like a sanctuary. It looks something like a sanctuary. And there are people who've argued that we should be sourcing the cells of animals for cultivating meat from sanctuaries. It looks something like a sanctuary, but you get genuine protections as workers because you are contributing. You're contributing to our food systems, you're contributing to our economies, you're contributing to our societies, okay? And so we say to these animals, welcome. Here is the kind of representation, the kind of protection you get. You have a right to join a union and we need to talk about what a union looks like. You have a right to a healthy, safe working environment. There are no slaughterhouses, houses here, there's no close confinement. You have a right to time off. You have a right to leisure. You have a right to pay. What does pay mean in this particular case? Complicated, interesting things that we need to explore. But what I'm hopefully offering here is a kind of route, a vision, a direction we could move in, which says something like animals are welcome in our future society and animals have place in our future society and animals can contribute to our future society, provided that contribution carries with it the sorts of protections and assurances that we give each other about our contributions to society.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay, Right. And yeah, so I mean, all of that was a little abstract, which is. But that's fine because you're talking about animals in general right now instead of about any particular animal. But you get less abstract in your chapter on eggs. I think one of the functions of that chapter was to try and flesh out in a particular case what it would mean to treat a particular type of animal, I guess, as workers. Particularly what it would mean to treat chickens as workers. So you get really quite concrete in that chapter.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, that's correct. And I think there's a sense in which I could have written a whole book exploring every single kind of animal that we currently use on farms and how we could try transform those farms. Because you need to get particular and you need to get specific. Let me use the examples of chickens. And to clarify in that chapter, I'm not talking about cultivated meat specifically, although as you quite rightly say, it fleshes out some of the particularities. I'm talking about the possibility of having something like an egg farm. Again, it's going to be a slaughter free egg farm. It's going to be a farm in which the chickens have genuine protections. But we need to address seriously specific things. For example, something I spend a lot of time talking about in that chapter is the fact that the eggs that are currently. Sorry, the chickens that are currently used for eggs, whether on farms or by hobbyists who keep chickens on their allotments or in their backyards, are chickens who have been bred to lay body destroying numbers of eggs. Jungle fowl, the kind of immediate wild ancestor of chickens, would lay perhaps a couple of dozen eggs a year. Chickens now at their prime will lay an egg a day. The sheer numbers involved, of course, have horrifying consequences for the animals themselves. This has led to a rather a tragic situation in that chickens are well known in the Cancer literature, and that is the cancer literature on humans, because domestic chickens are the only animals known to develop ovarian cancer in very high numbers other than humans. In fact, they have become a model of treatment for ovarian cancer. When you look at the work of chicken sanctuaries, they will say that very, very large numbers of the chickens that they receive who have been used for laying, whether again, by hobbyists or whether by commercial operations of various sizes and shapes, many of them, perhaps even most of them, will develop ovarian cancer at a fraction of their natural lifespan. A chicken can live for maybe 10, 12 years. There's records of them living much longer. But chickens on commercial egg farms are killed at 18 months, two years, and it's around that time that they start to develop ovarian cancer in quite large numbers. And by the time they're three or four, very large numbers of them will have developed ovarian cancer. And so we need to. This is just one specific example, the sort of puzzle that we need to grapple with. If chickens are being kept on something like farms for eggs, we need to think seriously about how we can combat or how we can help them and protect them against the kinds of challenges that they will face, right? And there are lots of treatments out there, right? As I say, they've been used as a model for the treatment of human cancers. But tragically, again, kind of tragic, given the. The nature of the question I'm asking here, the way to do this is to provide them with contraception. And so that defeats the idea of having an egg farm at all. And some people might say, oh, great, well, in that case, we'll just provide them with contraception. Egg farms are ruled out. But I would say, well, that. That seems to be troubling as well, because that. That leaves us in that position where, well, in that case, we liberate these chickens by making them no more. Or alternatively, we end up in a position where people can't have access to eggs and can't have access to this kind of work with chickens, which is. Is kind of tragic for them. So I'm interested in finding that kind of middle way. Are we able to have a system whereby we keep chickens and chickens live with us and are part of our community and contribute to our society in the particular way that they are able to, while also they get the genuine protection from the awful disease that they are very likely to develop? And it seems like there is because actually very, very, very low numbers of chickens develop ovarian cancer in their first few years. Which is when they are the most productive when it comes to eggs. So there is the possibility that these chickens could have the right, their right to retirement and their right to health respected by, quote, unquote, retiring, aged, say, 18 months, two years. You know, these are empirical questions that need to be addressed. Might vary from breed to breed. We get more specific still. And then they can be provided with contraception so these animals can work and be protected as workers and find value and meaning in their life as workers, potentially for the first few years of their life, and then could retire and get the protection that they need so we don't give them this severe risk of this awful, awful disease. Now, this might all sound really bizarre, and in a sense, it kind of is, because what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to find this. This. This middle ground, this middle way, this way, that. And this is a phrase I've used several times. We can have our cow and eat her, too. And this is a play on an English idiom, which is have our cake and eat it too. And what that means is have two things that seem to be incompatible. And those are one, a system that genuinely respects animal rights and welcomes them as members of our communities and protects them from the harms that we inflict upon them. But two, allows us access to a food system which benefits us, and I argue might benefit animals too, in which animal products remain. And I think that there is a way to do this, and the way we do this is we explore these complicated edge cases and sometimes get really kind of in the weeds in arguments about, you know, like I say, egg laying chickens, developing ovarian cancer. But I think it's worth putting the effort in to think through these ideas and to try to find a way that we can live with animals while still continuing to have access to those things that we value.

[Kyle Johansen]

Yeah. Thanks, Josh. All right, so activism is not your book's main concern, but you do discuss activism at some length in chapter seven. I was hoping that you would explain what implications your book's argument has for animal activism.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something I've been puzzling over because I think that, you know, if we take predominant models of animal activism, such as abolitionism and welfarism, either could be compatible with the kind of vision I've got. And I think that some of what I say points quite firmly towards abolitionism. For example, I've not got any particular time for animal agriculture as it currently exists. The kind of animal agriculture I'M advocating when I'm talking about chickens in that later chapter, for example, is so vastly different from almost anything in the current commercial ag industry that I think it'd be better to, to stop it all and start again. Right. Actually, the kind of thing I'm describing is much closer to what goes on in animal sanctuaries than it is in what goes on in animal agriculture. And then on the other hand, you might think, well, the clear focus on sentience when it comes to something like plausibly non sentient invertebrates that lends itself to a kind of welfarism. I suppose, like I said, there's no obvious, obvious, immediate implication for activism because this is deliberately a work of ideal theory and it's compatible with many different existing approaches to activism. My own sympathies are probably a little bit more abolitionist than they are welfarist, but I do think that there's room for a range of different approaches. I guess one of the things I would encourage all animal activists to do is to be a little bit more open than they sometimes are to the likes of cellular agriculture and to the likes of, of plant based meat. These industries as they exist right now, aren't necessarily perfect. I accept that there's room for improvement there. But especially when it comes to cellular agriculture, we have the opportunity now, you know, quite animal activists, quite animal rights activists to help influence and shape that industry and to push it in the right sort of direction. So I don't think anyone should read my book and take away the message, oh well, it's okay to be non vegan. Maybe they could take away the message, oh, it's okay to eat oysters or something like that. There might be very specific non vegan diets that the kind of argument I'm offering here suggests for today. And I don't think they should necessarily read what I say and think, oh, well, the kind of animal activism I'm doing is completely useless. Then what they should take away is a slightly different vision or a slightly different possible vision for the future. And then it's up to us in further work or in further activist work or academic work, or what it may be to reflect on what this alternative future might mean for how we behave now.

[Kyle Johansen]

Okay. Yeah, thanks, Josh. Well, look, I've taken up a lot of your time here. I'd like to thank you again for joining us to talk about your book Food, justice and Feeding the World. Respectfully, this book was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. The only other question I have for you is whether you're currently working on any projects, and if so, what are they?

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yes, well, I'm continuing to work on questions around food to a certain extent, so I expect there'll be more work of a similar ilk coming out over the next few years. And of course, I have the podcast Knowing Animals, which is a kind of ongoing project, and I encourage everyone to tune into alongside, of course, this excellent podcast. In terms of big new projects, there are two that I've got on the go, and one of them I mentioned earlier, Robert Nozick, who is someone who a complicated figure who has a rather complicated relationship to animal ethics. And I'm currently working on a book on what he says about animals and trying to explore whether he has a consistent vision of animals and whether it's a vision of animals that we should be excited about and might be open to. And again, his politics is not one that's won many friends, but he did say a lot of quite nice things about animals. He was a vegetarian himself and spent a lot of time talking about animals, even back in the 70s, you know, before animal ethics was mainstream in academic philosophy. And the other project I'm working on is on the ethics of animals and warfare, and I think that questions about warfare, sorry, questions about animals arise in conversations about warfare all the time. But curiously, academic approaches to the ethics of warfare have been very, very quiet on where animals fit in and what we might owe to animals in war. So I'm looking to develop an understanding of where animals fit into the ethics and politics and law of warfare and to then use that to reflect upon questions about violence and animals more broadly. So that's a big project that's going to last me hopefully for the next few years. But if anyone's working on questions around animals and war, do get in touch. I'd love to love to talk to you.

[Kyle Johansen]

It sounds like great stuff, Josh. Well, thanks again for joining me and hope you have a great day.

[Dr. Josh Milburn]

Yeah, thanks so much. Been great to talk to you.