Magnus Vinding > Quotes

“... if suffering warrants special moral concern, the truth is that we should never forget about its existence. For even if we had abolished suffering throughout the living world, there would still be a risk that it might reemerge, and this risk would always be worth reducing.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“It may be difficult for us to recognize that much of our epistemic brokenness is a direct product of our social and coalitional nature itself. After all, we tend to prize our social peers and coalitions, so it might be especially inconvenient to admit that they are often the greatest source of our epistemic brokenness — e.g. due to the seductive drive to signal our loyalties to them and to use beliefs as mediators of bonding, which often comes at a high cost to our epistemic integrity.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“The point of the term “suffering-focused ethics” is ... not to be a novel or impressive contribution to ethical theorizing, but instead to serve as a pragmatic concept that can unite as effective a coalition as possible toward the shared aim of making a real-world difference — to reduce suffering for sentient beings.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“We think with our culture. That is, we rarely think from first principles, even first principles we ourselves sincerely endorse, but rather from sentiments instilled in us by our culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of humanity’s moral attitudes toward non-human animals. Even most utilitarians, who by their own ideals ought to consider the suffering of all beings important, are still in fact exceptionally anthropocentric in their attitudes. The insights of Darwin have not yet trickled fully into our moral consciousness, not even among those whose moral views demand it. Such is the heavy momentum of culture, which is reflected in every facet of modern politics and political thought. The anthropocentrism of most political philosophy is, to put it mildly, a massive failure.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“The truth is that a more reasoned approach to politics does not come easily, but nor is it impossible. Like literacy, it requires hard work and the right cultural circumstances. And there is reason not to despair completely: the scientific study of our political psychology and biases is still quite young, and its key findings are still to be widely disseminated. We have yet to turn this crucial self-knowledge into common knowledge, and to make it part of our culture. In particular, we have yet to see it change the perhaps most important aspect of our culture, namely our social incentives.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“Perhaps one of the best things we can do to entrench better values in our institutions and in society at large is to promote sentiocracy — working to gradually increase the concern for and representation of non-human beings in the political process, and thus to make sentiocracy the future of democracy.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“This fact about human psychology may also be worth keeping in mind when others show a reflexively negative reaction toward us: they are not really reacting to us, but rather to their own negatively charged and unconsciously formed representation of us, which may indeed be an unpleasant cartoon figure to have to struggle with; a phantom struggle that merits both correction and compassion.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“We kill more than 50 billion animals every year in order to eat them, and that is just land animals alone, and we spend many of our resources on these – we for instance feed them with nearly 40 percent of all the grain in the world, which is more than enough grain to feed another two billion people.”
― Magnus Vinding, Why We Should Go Vegan

“Politics is broken. To say that this is a cliché has itself become a cliché. But it is true nonetheless. Empty rhetoric, deceptive spin, and appeals to the lowest common denominator. These are standard premises in politics that we seem stuck with, and which many of us shake our heads at in disappointment.

Yet it is not only our politicians who fail to live up to their potential. The truth is that we all do. Our reasoning about politics tends to be biased by an unconscious commitment to tribalism and loyalty signaling — yay our team, boo their team. That is, our political behavior is often less about promoting good policies than it is about the desire to see our own team win, and to signal our loyalty to that team. As a result, our conversations about politics often go nowhere, and they frequently go worse than that.

The good news is that we have compelling reasons to think that we can do better. And it is critical that we do so, as our political decisions arguably represent the most consequential decisions of all, serving like a linchpin of human decision-making that constrains and influences just about every choice we make. This renders it uniquely important that we get our political decisions right, and that we advance our political discourse in general.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“We can help others more effectively if we take good care of ourselves. This is just a psychological fact. [...] After all, whatever good one can do in a state of self-neglect, one can probably do much better in s healthy and happy state, implying that, even from a purely altruistic perspective, it is more than worth investing in one's own health and happiness.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Another big study followed more than 370,000 people over more than five years and found consumption of meat – both red meat and poultry meat – to be linked to weight gain over this period of five years. The perhaps most significant and surprising finding of this study was that even after controlling for caloric intake, eating meat was still associated with greater weight gain compared to a diet with the same amount of calories, but with a lower intake of meat.[30]”
― Magnus Vinding, Why We Should Go Vegan

“Many studies have demonstrated that we can change our minds when exposed to rational arguments, and that our initial opinions and prejudices can be challenged to a considerable extent.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“no matter how well we treat non-human animals, killing them in order to eat them is wrong: What”
― Magnus Vinding, Why We Should Go Vegan

“Being forced to endure torture rather than dreamless sleep, or an otherwise neutral state, would be a tragedy of a fundamentally different kind than being forced to “endure” a neutral state instead of a state of maximal bliss.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.[2]”
― Magnus Vinding, Why We Should Go Vegan

“We are using our resources to export food from countries where human beings die of starvation, and this we do in order to feed animals who live terrible lives, and we then kill these animals and eat their meat in amounts that raise our mortality risk significantly.”
― Magnus Vinding, Why We Should Go Vegan

“… a problematic feeling is indeed the exact opposite of an unproblematic feeling. Yet the fact that two states are each others’ opposites in this sense does not imply they are symmetric in the sense of being able to morally outweigh each other or meaningfully cancel each other out. Consider, by analogy, the states of being below and above water respectively. ... one can say that, in one sense, being 50 meters below water is the opposite of being 50 meters above water. But this does not mean, quite obviously, that a symmetry exists between these respective states in terms of their value and moral significance. Indeed, there is a sense in which it matters much more to have one’s head just above the water surface than it does to get it higher up still.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Giving equal consideration to all suffering will likely mean prioritizing non-human suffering on the margin, partly because non-human beings are so numerous, partly because their suffering is often extremely intense, and partly because their suffering is uniquely neglected — especially the suffering occurring on factory farms, in the fishing industry, and in nature; three of the biggest screaming elephants in the room of modern political discourse.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“Disaster on an unfathomable scale is always taking place on Earth. Countless instances of extreme suffering are occurring in this moment — right now. Yet because this suffering is so normal and ordinary, simply occurring every day, distributed rather evenly over time and space, it seems less evocative and urgent than the more unusual, more localized disasters, such as school shootings and earthquakes. Almost all the suffering that occurs on Earth can be considered baseline horror, which allows us to ignore it. We simply do not feel the ever-present emergency that surrounds us.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“... the notion that happiness and suffering are morally symmetric deserves our most meticulous scrutiny. It may, of course, seem intuitive to assume that some kind of symmetry must obtain, and to superimpose a certain interval of the real numbers onto the range of happiness and suffering we can experience — from minus ten to plus ten, say. Yet we have to be extremely cautious about such naively intuitive moves of conceptualization. … [I]t is especially true when our ethical priorities hinge on these conceptual models; when they can determine, for instance, whether we find it acceptable to allow astronomical amounts of suffering to occur in order to create “even greater” amounts of happiness.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“In light of this unconscious self-deception, one could argue that the attitude we should ideally adopt toward our own motives is roughly the same as the skeptical attitude that we tend to have toward the claims of a politician seeking to get elected.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“While it must be acknowledged that modern political systems work well in a number of ways, especially compared to those systems that wholly suppress civil liberties, it is also true that our political culture and ways of thinking about politics remain starkly underdeveloped and suboptimal in many ways. At the level of our individual thinking, collective norms, and the overarching cultural frameworks with which we tackle politics, there is great potential to do better.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“Given that our minds are the seat of all our beliefs and attitudes about politics, it is only reasonable that we make it a priority to understand the common function and pitfalls of our political minds, and that we seek to transcend these pitfalls rather than blindly allowing them to dictate our views.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“It is not just our physical health that a plant-based diet seems helpful for, however, since there are also tentative hints that it can be helpful for our mental health. One study set out to examine whether a diet without meat would have adverse effects on people's mood, and it actually found the opposite to be the case, since, on average, those who ate no meat “reported significantly less negative emotion than omnivores […]”[34] Another study that followed omnivores who had to stop eating meat and eggs for a period of time echoed this conclusion: “The complete restriction of flesh foods significantly reduced mood variability in omnivores.”[35] It is not clear why not consuming meat and eggs seems to have a positive effect on mood, but it may be because of the arachidonic acid prevalent in eggs and meat, especially poultry meat.[36]”
― Magnus Vinding, Why We Should Go Vegan

“The first steps toward motivated reasoning occur prior to conscious awareness, meaning that we often find ourselves on a moving train of motivated reasoning long before we can frame our first deliberate thought.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“The challenge of reducing suffering for all sentient beings can admittedly feel overwhelming. But the truth is that we can take real, incremental steps toward betterment and toward reducing the risk of worst-case outcomes. Our task is to ensure that we take the right such steps.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“We kill more than 50 billion non-human animals every year in order to eat them,”
― Magnus Vinding, Why We Should Go Vegan

“In short, our mission is to advance reasoned and compassionate politics for all sentient beings.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“One of our greatest epidemics today is obesity. It is estimated that more than 500 million people suffer from obesity worldwide today, and that it kills more than three million people each year. In comparison, about 55,000 people are killed in war each year, which of course in no way suggests that we are overestimating the horror and seriousness of war – how could we? – but the little attention we give to obesity in comparison does suggest, however, that we are not taking the “war” we should be waging against obesity seriously. It seems that we overlook what a merciless killer and cause of pain that obesity and the overeating that leads to it really is: it increases the risk of heart disease (the most common cause of death worldwide), many kinds of cancer, type 2 diabetes, degenerative joint disease and mental problems such as depression and low self-esteem.[27] Fortunately, a lot seems to imply that we have a powerful and peaceful weapon at our hands that can help us overcome obesity: a vegan diet.”
― Magnus Vinding, Why We Should Go Vegan

“Another widespread myth is that it is hard to get enough protein from a vegan diet, which is again just plain wrong. Nuts, seeds and lentils contain high amounts of protein in terms of weight, and even bread and oats contain quite high amounts of protein too. In fact, what is hard is to not get enough protein, on any diet, since it is quite hard to avoid protein, which makes it a mystery how this myth has ever become so widespread. Again: We can easily have all our nutritional needs met on a vegan diet.”
― Magnus Vinding, Why We Should Go Vegan