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Rutger Bregman is a historian and author. He is the co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition, a new initiative to mobilize talented professionals to work on the world’s most pressing problems. His latest book, Moral Ambition, explores how we can build lives and careers that make a real difference.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Rutger Bregman discuss what it means to have moral ambition, how to know which causes deserve support—and how to make the world vegan.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I've been struggling with a question which your book tries to answer in a systematic way: how to have moral ambition in the world and how to actually make the world a better place. I feel like when I was 15 or 16, I would have had very easy answers to that, like working for an NGO that does good work, or working for the United Nations, or fighting for your political ideals as an activist of some sort. But the older I get, the more skeptical I am that some of these things actually work and have impact. I’m also skeptical that we can foresee whether or not they might have unexpected negative consequences, and whether fighting for some cause in the wrong way might actually lead to opponents of that cause—or people with very different ideals and other important interests—gaining more political power and influence. So, in 2025, how should people who want to have a positive impact on the world, who don't want to disengage from the ambition to do good, think intelligently about how to do that?
Rutger Bregman: That's actually the exact same feeling I had. Maybe it's part of becoming older. I spent about a decade writing articles and books about everything we should try and fix—providing all kinds of radical ideas about how we can make this world a wildly better place—all the while just hoping that some other people will do the actual work. More and more I've realized that doing good is incredibly hard and that the way the world works is often very weird. Very often, things that you think would work don't work at all, or the right things happen for the wrong reasons.
I’ll tell you a little bit about why I wanted to write this book, Moral Ambition. I was actually working on another book about the great moral pioneers of the past: the abolitionists, the suffragettes, and the civil rights campaigners. I started with the abolitionists and I discovered a couple of things. The first was that most abolitionists in most countries weren't very successful. I am from the Netherlands, and the Netherlands didn't really have an abolitionist movement. We did have a bunch of Calvinist social justice warriors who were very interested in their own moral purity, but they didn't get much done. Does that remind you of anything? In France, you had a bunch of writers and intellectuals who were very good at preaching and writing long essays, but, again, they didn't get much done. In Spain and Portugal, there was nothing.
It was only in Britain that the movement took off and was really successful. I think one of the reasons for this was that it was led by entrepreneurs. 10 out of 12 founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade had built their own companies and scaled them. They were quite wealthy, and they used that wealth, their network, and their skills to take on this fight. But the other thing that really surprised me about this movement is just how pragmatic it was. If you talk to a lot of activists today, they might say things like, we should learn from the abolitionists—just be against slavery, just be against the slave trade. A lot of vegans are like that today: go vegan and just convince one person at a time to stop eating meat and dairy. Well, we've tried that for 50 years. It doesn't seem to be working.
Indeed, if you actually look at how these successful abolitionists did it, they had a very different kind of playbook. If I can give you one example, which was a big surprise for me, one of their most effective political arguments back then was not about the suffering of enslaved people on the slave ships or in the colonies. No, they discovered at some point that 20% of white sailors were dying during the voyages. They realized that this was politically very powerful because now they could go to Westminster and talk to William Pitt, the prime minister at the time. He was deeply impressed when he heard that “our boys” were dying on these ships. And this is a tactic that psychologists call moral reframing. It's finding different arguments that resonate with different audiences for the same point that you're trying to make. This is just an example of how weird history can often be. We tend to think that surely, these abolitionists would just have shouted “ban slavery” all day and if you keep doing that, at some point, people will ban slavery. Well, that's not at all how it happened. The whole history of abolitionism is littered with weird and crazy examples of how things didn't happen the way you expect they would.
Mounk: I like how many counterintuitive things are contained in that little snippet. You and I, as writers, would like to think that what moves history is the perfectly written pamphlet, book, or essay. Perhaps we sometimes have a slight tendency to look down on our friends who've done MBAs and are out in the business world actually doing things. But it turns out that people who have had real life experience, know how to build an organization and know how to make things work, might actually be more impactful.
I also find this question about which argument to choose very interesting. Both of those are bad things. These young white people on those boats dying is a bad thing. It's less morally bad than the people who were stolen from their land and shipped off to other countries in an extremely violent way. But if you can use one of those bads in order to also undermine the other, then perhaps you should do that.
I’m struck by the fact that, often in forms of purity politics, we go out of our way not to do that. In the debate that's been big in the last years—though it doesn't seem to have moved me that much—about police violence in the United States, I was always struck by the fact that there is a disproportionate impact on African-Americans for all kinds of reasons, like from how difficult it is to hold bad cops to account in the United States. But it also has a lot of impact on others. The majority of unarmed people who are shot dead in the United States are white, just because whites remain a very clear majority of the overall population. Not only do we not emphasize this point in order to build solidarity around this, in many cases we explicitly de-emphasize it because it would somehow seem that to say white people are affected by this too sounds like “white lives also matter.” It sounds like you're undermining the cause when, actually, it could just be a way to build a broader coalition to fight for important reforms.
Bregman: Yeah, absolutely. The book is about how you can effectively make the world a wildly better place. That's what I've come to call moral ambition. With the combination of, on the one hand, the idealism of an activist, and, on the other hand, the entrepreneurship and ambition of someone who actually builds things comes together, something really magical happens. I spent a lot of time in my book critiquing the people who are very ambitious, but not very idealistic. Sometimes this is described as “the Bermuda triangle of talent.” A friend of mine who went to Oxford University always calls it that. All those people who've ended up in consultancy, finance, or corporate law, may at one time have been really idealistic—when they still studied at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. But then McKinsey knocked on their door and something happened, I guess.
But I also spend a lot of time critiquing those people who are very idealistic, but not very ambitious. They aren't very serious about actually achieving results. I like to describe them as noble losers—people who are more interested in their own moral purity and in washing their own hands in innocence than in actually helping those people that they say they really care about. The billions of animals that are currently tortured in factory farms, the people who are suffering from police violence or inequality or oppression, and the people who are currently suffering from war crimes in Gaza don't care about what you say in the comment section. They don't care that you've just won a debate in the group chat. They want you to achieve real results that will improve their lives. That's what it means to be morally serious. There's a huge lack of this currently, in my view, on the left. There are a lot of idealistic people who just don't seem to have the ambition of actually making a difference.
Mounk: I'm going to try to set up a different kind of trilemma and see how you think about it or respond to it. It's not really a trilemma, but three very difficult things that you need to each get right in order to have a positive impact in the world. The first is that you have to choose a good cause and a cause that remains good. That's not a trivial thing. I can absolutely see why my grandparents—who grew up in small towns in what is now Ukraine, in a time of great poverty, discrimination, and social inequality—believed that the promises of communism could make the world a better place. We would all be equal. We would all be brothers. Ethnic and religious distinctions would no longer define our societies. They, very courageously, with a lot of moral ambition, devoted themselves to advancing a cause which turned out to kill millions of people and perpetuate poverty in a part of the world that might otherwise have grown economically much more quickly. Most people are the heroes in their own stories. Most people, even those who fight for political causes that you and I might find horrifying from day one, think that they are doing something morally ambitious and morally good. Choosing a cause that is actually good and choosing a cause that actually will have good consequences, not just speaking in terms of positive ideals, is not at all trivial. So that's number one.
Then there's number two, which is where you have to choose the right tactics, strategies and approaches. To fight for a cause that might be objectively good in ways that are ineffective, might give you victories in the group chat, as you say, but not actually do anything.
Thirdly, you also have to think about unintended consequences in terms of a potential victory on the other side. Barack Obama is a politician I still admire greatly. I have my disagreements with him and my criticisms of some of the things that may have gone wrong during his presidency, but he's still—of all politicians living today—one that I greatly admire. But it's easy to tell a counterfactual history in which without Obama, you don't get Trump. If Mitt Romney had won in 2012, the world would probably be in a much better place today, right? So, even if you are really fighting for causes that—let's say, for sake of argument—are good, and even if you're very effective, the impact of all of that may in fact be that you move history in a really dark direction as a result. So, perhaps we can click on each of those three elements. But, to me, that is what makes it so hard to think through what to actually devote one's life to and how to actually make improvements. Because once you recognize the difficulty of each of these three obvious points, and the three in conjunction, it becomes very hard to feel like you can predict what impact your life is going to have.
Bregman: Those are three really good points and let's click on all of them. Let's first talk about picking the right cause. So, I'm no moral philosopher. I'm no ethicist. I'm a historian. I like to think that I have what you could call a common-sense view of morality. I do see a certain directionality in the moral progress we've made in the last two centuries. I think it all started with the abolitionist movement. That was the first big attempt to expand the moral circle, as a philosopher like Peter Singer would call it. Once people started doing that, there were always logical next steps. So it's no surprise to me that the first suffragettes were initially abolitionists. Once they had achieved certain successes with the abolition of slavery in 1834 across the British Empire, it became logical to think about pushing this even further: don't women have rights as well then? After that came the children's rights movements, the union movements, the civil rights movements, LGBT movements. So I do think there's a certain logic at play here.
It doesn't surprise me that a lot of the first abolitionists also cared deeply about animal rights. William Wilberforce was the founder of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the United Kingdom. Benjamin Lay, who was a Quaker, was the very first abolitionist in the United States and was also pretty much a vegan, even though the word didn't exist back then. So, for me, morality is not random. Once you start recognizing the inherent dignity of each and everyone on this planet, you believe in something like human rights and a certain amount of equality, then there is a certain logic at play.
I also think that very often, moral disagreements are not as big as we think they are. For example, I've co-founded an organization called The School for Moral Ambition and we help really talented people to pivot their career to work on some of the most pressing issues we face as a species. One of the causes we've taken up is the fight against big tobacco. I've never met anyone who wanted to make the case that the tobacco industry is a really good industry doing good work. It's the deadliest product in the history of civilization. It's killing 8 million people on an annual basis, which is like a jumbo jet crashing every 30 minutes. It's purposely made to be as addictive as possible. There are no big moral disagreements here in my view.
The same is true for something like factory farming. I turned pretty much vegan around a decade ago. Sometimes I get these invitations from television programs asking me to debate factory farming and the morality of it. I always say, yes, of course I want to, but good luck finding someone who wants to defend the other side. Very often, the journalists come back to me a couple of days later saying they couldn't find anyone. Anyone who looks into this knows just how horrific it is.
I think that sometimes people overestimate the moral differences in cases like these. We can really pick some cases where we all agree that what's going on is really bad. Take malaria: 600,000 people die from malaria every year. Very little is happening to prevent that. I've never met anyone who's pro-malaria. The disagreement is more on the method to solving it. I would also place something like communism in that bucket. Most of us would agree with the goals of communism in theory: wouldn't it be nice to live in a utopian society where we'd all be happy and there would be equality? It's just that it doesn't really doesn't work that way. It had a totally broken economic model and even the politics was completely messed up. I think that's where things get really tricky. Very often, what you think works just doesn't work.
In the book, I talk about a simple example like fair trade. I think that most people are like, yeah, sure. Let's pay a little bit extra money for my chocolate or my rice and yeah, let's help poor farmers far away. Well, economists always pour cold water on this. They've done extensive studies and I'm sorry to say that it just doesn't work. The money doesn't end up with the poor farmers, it ends up with some middleman along the way. So the intentions are great, but the results are not. That's more or less my take. Especially when you think about the methods, you need to have a deep humility and have a very deep understanding that, very often, what you think works is not going to work. So surround yourself with people who can be very critical of your work. Build quick feedback loops and make sure you get feedback from reality, so that you know when something is really not working the way you want it to.
Mounk: I'm excited to dive more deeply into methods in a moment, but let's stay for now with this question about what the goals are, because I agree that there are some goals that seem on the surface to be uncontroversial, but perhaps really are. I'm not going to argue with you that malaria might turn out to be a good thing. If we can divert more resources in an intelligent way to eradicating malaria in the world, that obviously is a good thing. There's other causes like that as well. At some level, I share the worldview you have, which is that humanity has made moral progress over the last centuries. That's something that we should absolutely defend. And if you think that we have made moral progress over the last centuries in doing things like abolishing slavery, giving women a lot more rights in society, etc., we should think that we can also go on to have more moral progress in the future.
I nevertheless worry that it may not be as easy to recognize what constitutes further moral progress like that today and what doesn't if you're operating within that framework. It's a framework I basically accept, but that I think could often lead us wrong. There's a few concerns I have here.
The first is that the distinction between goals and means may not always be as clear as one hopes. One description of what's wrong with communism is to say they chose the wrong means. It just turns out that the regulated free market is much more effective at creating human welfare than a planned economy. That wasn't obvious. In the 1940s and ‘50s, a lot of economists believed that that wouldn't turn out to be true, but now we are pretty confident that it is. So, that was a big mistake about means. But perhaps there's also something about the goal of a fully equal society, specified as the early communists did, that just inherently chafes against human nature in ways that we should have been more skeptical about. Perhaps part of the failure of communism is not only the practical failure of central planning, but actually that it had the wrong goals in some way.
Another way of making this critique and of expressing skepticism is to say that the way we remember history is often wrong. I think there is a basically progressive view in which we say that at each step, there were people who wanted to change things in order to make them better and others who stood in the way. We've made more progress over time and that's because the progressives won against the conservatives at each of those steps. Now we have recognized that, of course, African Americans should have the same rights, black people around the world should have the same rights, women should have the same rights, etc. There's an element of that in the history of the last 300 years.
But we often forget the moments where the left or the progressives were on the wrong side of things and where what seemed like the logical next step turned out to be wrong. When you think about the breaking of sexual taboos in the 1950s and 1960s, and the centuries before that as well, there seemed to be a very logical progression where they were saying that all of these things we thought needed to be stopped and regulated have turned out to just be old superstitions. Society is much better off after the sexual liberation. And you know what the remnant is? You know what the last thing is where we haven't yet applied the sexual revolution? The sexual self-determination of children. That's how you ended up getting a lot of very serious philosophers signing letters advocating for the abolition of the age of consent and other kinds of things. But now we look back at them as these monsters. How could they basically advocate for pedophilia? But there was at the time a kind of logic to saying that is just the natural next step. And it turned out very much not to be the natural next step.
Bregman: That's a really good point. Perhaps the same is true, by the way, for drugs among liberals and progressives. There's also the tendency to want to liberate it. The Netherlands was actually ahead on this already in the nineties. It liberalized the use of weed and wanted to go further and further. And actually, I've been thinking recently, won't that give us another tobacco industry? They're much bigger than what we currently have. You have a huge legalized evil industry making even more people addicted and making a shitload of money at the same time. I think you could argue that's basically what has already happened in the United States with weed. As a European walking down the streets in New York, I'm astonished at how many of these shops you have everywhere pushing weed. You smell it everywhere as well. Do we really want that? To create enormous commercial incentives that make people addicted?
But I have to be honest that I changed my mind on this. If you would've talked to me a decade ago, I was that kind of progressive. I thought that people can handle it and prohibition will always fail. I thought just liberalizing it would make things work out fine. I think what goes wrong there is just that ideology gets in the way of the scout mindset. On a higher level, you still care about human welfare. It's just that you've doubled down on a certain method, like liberalization. But anyway, I see your point that causes and methods are not always easy to distinguish.
Mounk: Here’s another way of thinking about this. I'm a liberal in the philosophical sense. However, we have to retain a scout mindset, and perhaps it turns out that liberalism is not the right philosophy for the 21st century once we have artificial general intelligence and all kinds of other things. I for now believe that the evidence remains firmly on liberalism's side. That gives you a basic moral framework for where to push for equality and where not to push for equality. Any being that is capable of a certain form of self-government should have the rights and the ability to do that. People who are capable of ordering life according to their conception of the good should both have a freedom to choose the life they want and the access to some set of basic resources needed to do that. That is the basic political credo that I have. Now, you can get into all kinds of debates about what choosing means. I think some liberals are much too far on the side of imagining that, at 18, we all self-discover and self-reinvent from scratch. For a lot of people, that simply means remaining true to the pre-existing moral and perhaps religious commitments that they grew up with. You can talk about what it means to have access to those resources. Are we talking about freedom to participate in the market? Or are we talking about a much more Scandinavian kind of welfare state that ensures that more proactively?
Now, this means that I can easily solve the question of enslaved people or of women because it's an empirical question to begin with. You have to actually have a certain set of empirical beliefs about the equality of different human groups, but those hopefully are very uncontroversial in 2025. So, my ideology tells me that disenfranchising people on the basis of their biological sex, their skin color or of other such factors in any way is a great evil and we have to fight against it. The problem with this is that at some point you run out of road. Precisely because we have made great progress over the course of the last 200 years, I wonder whether the cause of fighting for formal equality is no longer the most pertinent lens for looking at society today. We want to sustain those gains and they might always be at risk. We don't want to lose sight of that. We might want to make other kinds of improvements. I care about animal welfare and I recognize the evil of factory farming, even though I don't think that animals are our equals in a way that would make sense to make them citizens or give them political rights or anything like that.
But it does mean that, suddenly, the remaining ethical questions become a lot more complicated. It's much more complicated to think about the right treatment of animals when they're not part of our liberal political community and when we can't, in any very meaningful sense, give them political rights. Or, you get into really complicated questions about, for example, trans rights. What is the right balance between the interests of people who have transitioned to have full participation in society and the interest that biological women might have in feeling safe in certain same-sex spaces? What is the right treatment of a 13-year-old who feels strongly that they were born in the wrong body and wants to have certain sets of hormonal or medical interventions so that they can potentially pass as the gender with which they identify, when on the other hand, we know that there's lifelong medical risks that might come from that and we might come to regret that change? How do we think about those things? I think you get into much more morally gray and complicated territory because we're no longer in the world of, should we be able to enslave people because they happen to have a different skin color? Well, of course not, right? What do we do about the 13-year-old who's confused about gender identity? How exactly do we fight for the interests of sentient beings that aren't capable of inclusion in the liberal community?
Bregman: Yeah, absolutely. One of the questions I keep coming back to in the book is, how will the historians of the future look back on us? Because for us, it's fairly easy to look back on, say, the Mayas and the Aztecs who engaged in child sacrifice or the Romans who threw naked women for the lions in the Colosseum or the Middle Ages who burned witches at the stake, right? We say that those people were barbarians. The point is obviously that pretty much every civilization throughout history has believed that it was the most civilized civilization ever. The Romans thought very highly of themselves because they didn't sacrifice kids anymore. That's what the barbarians did. So, it would be quite a coincidence if we turned out to be that one civilization at the beginning of the 21st century that has figured it all out.
Then, what's the framework we could use for trying to find out what we're still doing wrong today? In my book, I talk about a couple of potential candidates for things that might be ongoing moral atrocities. And indeed, I do think that the way we treat animals is probably the most obvious one. It's really easy, in my view at least, to make the case from a lot of different moral perspectives. As I said, I rarely get any pushback here. It's one of those things that people know already. Jeremy Bentham said this in one of his famous footnotes about animals: It doesn't matter whether they can reason or whether they can talk or how intelligent they are. The point is, can they suffer? That's the question. We've got an abundance of evidence now that says that they can suffer immensely. We've created the worst conditions for them in which they do suffer immensely.
But there are other cases that are more difficult for me. There's one thing in particular, I'm curious to hear your opinion here on it. With advancing neuroscience, it becomes clearer, in my view, that this thing we call free will doesn't really make sense. Philosophers can have long debates about what free will actually is but I think the way most people see free will is that you have some power independent of causality, to change the trajectory of your life. But there was this famous case of a man who turned out to develop a sexual interest in children. They found this tumor in his brain. They removed it and the interest was gone. As neuroscience progresses, I think it will become more and more difficult to assign moral blame to people because we will understand human behavior better and better. This is a little bit like how God has retreated in the last couple of centuries. Some philosophers call this the God of the Gaps. Newton still needed God to make sure that the laws of nature still work. But then, there's this famous moment when the French physicist Laplace was asked by Napoleon after he had read his big book on physics, where's God in this book? And then Laplace said, well, I didn't need that hypothesis. I feel that the same thing could be happening to free will right now.
That has enormous political and moral implications. Would it still make sense to punish people? Well, perhaps if you have pragmatic reasons, right? Some people are just a danger to society. So you can always use that argument. But some people just need to be locked up. Does it make sense to punish them in a more moralistic way? Maybe not anymore. Maybe the historians of the future will consider that utterly barbaric. A form of a pagan religion or something like that. But the same could be true on the flip side of this, giving people all kinds of bonuses. Why should we give the people who are lucky enough to have a lot of willpower, high IQ, or a high amount of agency more money and prestige? You could still use the pragmatic argument and say that we've tested other economic models.
We just talked about communism. We've seen it doesn't work, but that's a pretty weak defense. That defense is always threatened by the possibility of another model that would still be effective economics and bring economic growth or innovation. There are a couple of critics of free will out there, like Sam Harris, for example, or Robert Sapolsky. But I always felt that they don't really take the argument far enough to realize how radical the point they're making is. If we really come to the conclusion that free will doesn't exist the way we think it does, our whole political philosophy basically collapses and the whole reasoning for giving some people bonuses based on their merits and punishing other people for their failings doesn't make sense anymore. Here I'm just super confused about how we should even move forward. I'm curious to hear what you think.
Mounk: I certainly don't have any definitive answers to the free will debate. I had Robert Sapolsky on the podcast for a spirited conversation if people want to look it up. I also recently recorded a very interesting conversation with Kevin Mitchell, who has a defense of free will. I think I tend towards a somewhat more, I suppose, compatibilist reading of the free will debate. This is in part for the reasons you point out, that our entire way of thinking about the world would be pulverized by giving up on any idea of free will. I actually think it's impossible for humans to coherently do that. It's interesting that we always focus on the punishment side. Perhaps we should no longer punish people, perhaps we might sort of isolate them from the community if they're dangerous, but we can no longer have moral standing to punish if they didn't fully choose the action in some kind of idealized way.
But we never think about the positive side of that. If you genuinely think that we don't have free will and that we're just automata that are being acted upon, then you can't love your spouse. You can't feel gratitude towards your friend, right? All kinds of other moral emotions would have to go out of the window as well. I think that just means that a particular account of what morality consists of is mistaken. I recognize that you happen to be smart and you happen to be a nice guy and that's why I'd love to have lunch with you. I don't think you deserve those things. I don't think you chose those things. I don't think some other schmuck chose to be an unpleasant idiot. But what it means for me to like you and think of you as an acquaintance and perhaps eventually a friend is that I recognize those positive attributes in you and those are the things that I relate to. Those are the qualities on the basis of which I treat you. The fact that those aren't fully deserved, the fact that those aren't fully chosen, to me isn't some kind of gotcha which makes me think that I should be as keen to have lunch with the idiot down the street as I am to have with you. So, I think there's a way to sidestep this debate of free will, but we're not going to solve that.
I love this question about how we're going to think very differently about morality in a hundred years than we do today. What's going to seem obviously unjust about our society in ways that we don't recognize? But of course, if we went back to the members of past societies and asked them that, they wouldn't have given the answers that we would give today. Perhaps people in Ancient Rome or Ancient Athens wouldn't have said anything about their treatment of slaves, how terrible it is, and that they really should rethink it. Perhaps they would think that actually, their moral standards are slipping and they’re giving too many rights to women and they're going around being too bold. We might be given very different answers from the ones we give today. I think you're right that, especially if we find new technologies that allow us to produce tasty protein at scale in a way that doesn't involve animal suffering, we will look back and talk about how barbarous the practice of making all these sentient beings suffer was in order to have a nice lunch or dinner.
By the same token, I might say that similar things might be true about our reproductive technologies. Now, you and I are both kind of similar in certain respects. We both come from pretty secular European countries. But I imagine that if it becomes trivially easy to make reproductive choices in 100 years, and if nobody ever becomes pregnant without choosing to do so, we might very well look back at this time and say, how on earth could they tolerate a million people being aborted in the United States every year? How could they think that we should be super-concerned about the suffering involved in milking a cow, but were fine with five-month-old fetuses being killed? That's not something that comes to us as easily because we're raised in a moral culture where worrying about those things implies a certain set of political convictions and stances that make us nervous. But there may be other things like that that we're not thinking about because they're so fundamental to how our civilization runs.
Bregman: What I find a bit troublesome about this question, Yascha, is that I don't want to end up in a place where we're two guys on a podcast thinking about how this is all really interesting and go, I guess we'll never know, let's see a hundred years from now, because I really don't think we're in that situation. I do think we have a decent amount of moral clarity on some obvious examples that I just gave. I'm pretty sure that the way we treat animals today is utterly horrific. If we can find some way of getting out of this situation, indeed by coming up with tasty alternatives, I think that's probably going to be the way forward. Indeed, we will look back on this utterly horrified. That's just because I have seen the responses of people who are pretty devout carnivores to certain images. Whenever people learn more about how their meat and dairy is produced, pretty much everyone is really shocked. So for me, this is one of those cases where we don't need deep philosophical discussion wondering what Plato would have said. I'm also a little bit worried that making these kinds of things too abstract or too philosophical is a way of evading moral responsibility, of not recognizing that we're in a pretty urgent situation and that we've got to do something.
Mounk: No, that's definitely a point. That then implies the second question that we've delayed a little bit but promised to get back to. Let's say that we agree that a lot of our practices for how to procure the meat that most of us—including myself—eat are deeply unethical. What do we do about that? Is it a matter of individual consumption choice? Is it a matter of exhorting people to stop eating meat and convincing people to be vegetarians or vegans? What kind of tactics do you think are appropriate in order to pursue a moral goal like that?
Bregman: I think it starts with recognizing that we need a whole toolbox and that a certain tool that may work really well at one time will not work at another time. If we go back to the abolitionist movement, what we see is that initially they needed to be really pragmatic. They focused on stuff like the suffering of white sailors. They decided not to fight slavery as such, but instead to fight the slave trade, the transport of people from Africa towards the colonies in the Caribbean, because they knew that it was politically toxic to say anything about private property or the autonomy of the colonies. But then, later, there came a moment in the 1820s and the 1830s when the movement actually needed to become more radical. William Wilberforce, one of the famous abolitionists, who was still a gradualist, was saying that they should phase out slavery and that's the way forward. But it was very necessary that there was a new generation of young abolitionists who talked about “abolition right now.” That actually gave the movement a lot of new energy.
I think that is something to keep in mind here. If we look at something like the movement for climate justice or the fight against climate change, sometimes we need people like my mother, who was recently arrested once again. She's an Extinction Rebellion activist. I think that there are moments when you need those kinds of people. I think there's decent, good evidence that the climate movement—the Greta Thunberg effect, as it's sometimes called among political scientists—really helped push the case forward and really helped politicians with the necessary momentum to propose certain legislation. It helped entrepreneurs to make sure that there are more subsidies for their products, and so on. I find it funny that very often, people who benefit from these kinds of movements also dislike the movements. I've spoken to entrepreneurs who've built quite successful climate companies in the last couple of years. They say that they don't like the activists. I say, well, I assume you do like it that they keep pushing this particular topic. And maybe it's not their goal to be liked. Maybe that's not what it's about.
There are other times though, when these movements really don't work. In the 90s we had a lot of confrontational activism for animal rights that I think did immense damage to the animal rights movement. They really discredited it for many years. You probably needed quite a bit more pragmatism and a more entrepreneurial approach there. There are cases like, for example, the women's rights movements. It's hard to imagine the second wave of feminism without the birth control pill that gave women control over their own fertility. Well, that was one feminist philanthropist, Katharine McCormick, who in the 50s said that she wanted this thing to exist. She deliberately sought out the scientist who could make her the pill. It was initially called Inovit, but it was so revolutionary that today we just call it the pill. I think it's really important to keep coming back to that toolbox metaphor. It's just realizing that what may work at a certain point in time may not work at another point in time. Resist the temptation of falling in love with your own method. You, for example, Yascha, come across as a guy who really likes deep philosophical discussion, maybe not the kind of guy who walks down the street with a sign that says “climate justice now.” But I think you and I gotta be smart enough to recognize that sometimes that's what is necessary and that's what pushes things forward.
Mounk: I guess there's two levels at which to ask a question about tactics and strategy. One is the slightly lower level. Let's say there is a meat factory in your town or close to your town that has particularly heinous practices and you're trying to think about how to get it shut down, regulated or changed. You have to think about whether to invite the owner of the factory for dinner, try to have a civilized conversation, appeal to their conscience, and make them see that what they’re doing is wrong and have a change of heart—or whether to organize a group of people to stage a viral action in front of the factory that incites public opinion, shames them, or impedes their business interests. Then, there's a slightly different question about what actually is the strategic goal. In the case of the meat industry, I think the two are a little bit less in contrast. Is it fighting each factory farm or is it saying that we have to go upstream to a technological level and that the best animal rights activists are the entrepreneurs who started Impossible Meats? How do we push it forward so that people no longer have that moral choice between enjoying a steak dinner and contributing to the suffering of animals?
In the case of a climate movement, the question that I would love to ask your mother is, “Is that actually the right framework for changing the climate? Right now, is it really the priority in the world to reduce carbon emissions, or is the priority to get enough electricity to poor people in rural Africa and parts of Asia who don't have a light to switch on at night, who can't cook in a safe way, who can't get to the next town to get medical treatment because they don't have enough energy? Is the right way to deal with climate change not investing in technologies that are going to bind more carbon in the ocean as my friend Quico Toro argued in a recent article?” It’s easy to dismiss all that by saying, well, those are nice debates to have on a podcast. But I do think that a lot of activist movements from the past, which we now see in retrospect as ineffective, failed for different reasons. Some of them didn’t manage to win over public opinion. Others, it turns out, were kind of barking up the wrong tree.
Bregman: As you know, agenda-setting is incredibly important in politics. It's just making sure that people talk about the right things. I think that's where movements like Extinction Rebellion play a really important role. Even if you don't like them, every time they're in the news we're talking about climate again. I think that a lot of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have benefited from them raising the issue of climate change so that they can raise money for their companies to actually develop some of the solutions that you just talked about. So, I think we shouldn't dismiss that kind of interaction.
Now, what is the right tactic to make progress against something like factory farming? Here are three things that are very different, but all of which I like. Take an organization like the Humane League. They have the Genghis Khan model of fighting factory farming. So, Genghis Khan famously—whenever he would arrive at a new city that he wanted to conquer—would say, surrender now, or I will completely destroy you. If the city would not surrender, he would utterly destroy the whole city. They would rape all the women, kill all the men, etc. Then, they would go to the next city and say, you see what we did there? Surrender now or we'll do it again.
That's basically the model of some of these animal rights organizations where they choose one company in particular and they say, we're going to throw everything we have at you. We're going to make your life horrible. There are going to be activists at all your shops all the time. We're going to shame you in the media, unless you say that you’re going to go cage-free or that you’ll treat your chickens better. That's been really effective. In the United States, there's been enormous progress towards cage-free eggs, for example. A lot of that has been pushed by groups like the Humane League.
Now, a completely different tactic is something that I talk about in my book. There’s an animal rights activist called Leah Garcés, who is currently at Mercy for Animals. One of the things she realized is that a lot of the farmers are currently also being exploited. So, it's not just chickens, but also these factory farmers very often make very little money, are under the poverty line and often want to get out of the business—but they can't because then they will have to sell the land that has been in the family for a long time. So, she actually became friends with one of these factory farmers, a man named Craig Watts in North Carolina. They agreed to team up against these big multinational corporations that are not only exploiting the animals, but also the farmers. Very different kind of strategy, right? That was super effective in raising awareness. They've done multiple productions together that have gone utterly viral. So that's tactic number two. Tactic number three could indeed be completely different. As you mentioned, some of these hardcore animal rights activists have now turned into entrepreneurs who've raised money to develop things like clean meat or precision fermentation, a very exciting new technology where you use microbes to produce certain kinds of proteins that are also present in meat. And indeed, the Impossible Burger is one of the famous examples here. I'm very excited to be living in the United States right now because the Impossible Burger is sadly illegal in Europe due to very silly environmental laws—another good example of people with good intentions doing a lot of harm. We have a total ban on GMO in Europe. But here I can eat these impossible burgers and I can't get enough of them because they're the tastiest plant-based burgers out there. So I think that all these three things can be effective.
Mounk: Wait, I didn't know this. Is the Impossible Burger illegal in Europe? Can you explain this to me?
Bregman: Yes. Well, basically the green movement has done a really effective lobbying campaign in Europe on what we call the precautionary principle. They saw some bad uses of GMO and that ended up in a total ban, which is really sad and terrible because our current food system is just a nightmare in terms of sustainability and animal welfare. Europe should be leading the way here. But we've really tied our own hands by imposing this total ban. Novel food regulation is also a nightmare. This is why, with my organization, we are now recruiting really smart lobbyists and legal people out of their job to work on advancing the cause of alternative proteins in Brussels. What we need here is something that people like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson would call the abundance agenda. Environmentalists have been really good at saying no and blocking things. But what we actually need is a way to open things up again so that we will have a new wave of innovation. It’s the status quo that is currently benefiting from all these bans—not the planet, the climate or animals.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Rutger share advice for embracing moral ambition in your career, and ask if there’s any hope for those of us over 30 looking to make a difference. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
