In this video fragment from Dutch tv on August 20th 2017 Frans de Waal says that the meat industry is bad, but he continues to eat meat.
When the interviewer confronts him with this discrepancy, de Waal responds: I am part of the food chain;
I am an animal; I behave like an animal; therefore I eat meat.
That argument is the *Naturalistic Fallacy* or *Appeal to nature*: one cannot derive human moral values from nature.
An argument is a fallacy solely by the logical structure of the argument.
Here is a logical reconstruction of the fallacy:
(1) That which is natural, is morally good [premise]
(2) Meat eating is natural [premise]
(3) Therefore, meat eating is morally good [conclusion]
Premise (1) is wrong because nature is a-moral. Therefore conclusion (3) is invalid.
Lions and tigers are not evil when killing prey. Herbivores are not morally superior.
Erupting volcanoes and deadly hurricanes are not immoral.
That's why we cannot derive morals from the natural world.
However, I don't need to convince de Waal of the fallacy anymore.
I discovered that he in fact agrees! He wrote in _The Age of Empathy. Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society_ (2010):
"The problem is that one can’t derive the goals of society from the goals of nature.
Trying to do so is known as the naturalistic fallacy, which is the impossibility of
moving from how things are to how things ought to be.
Thus, if animals were to kill one another on a large scale, this wouldn't mean we
have to do so, too, any more than we would have an obligation to live in perfect
harmony if animals were to do so. All that nature can offer is information and
inspiration, not prescription." (Chapter 2: The Other Darwinism.)
He even uses the example of animals killing each other!
So, he knows perfectly well that nature cannot give a moral justification for killing animals.
And he made no secret of it: 'Naturalistic Fallacy' is present in the alphabetic index of his book 'The Age of Empathy'.
My question: why does a scientist use a fallacy when he knows it is wrong?
In his books, lectures and interviews he promotes 'The Age of Empathy' and 'a Kinder Society'. But his publicly stated morality of empathy is a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish, brutish and carnivorous nature.
So:
- his meat eating habit makes him a person without empathy with animals;
- telling the meat industry is not animal-friendly, and continuing eating meat, makes him a hypocrite;
- inventing a fallacy makes him an intellectually dishonest person;
- in 2019 he stated that he stopped with eating *mammals* ('Mama's Last Hug').
- he never stopped attackking vegans
LINKS:
- Killing Animals in the Age of Empathy. Frans de Waal, a leading primatologist explains why he eats animals (26 September 2017):
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-Two obituaries of Frans de Waal (1948–2024). And why Frans de Waal hated vegans
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[text updated: May 3 2024]
