You’ve been there before. You start talking to a friend and before you even consciously realize it you have steered the conversation towards the vegan question. You’ve asked them to name the trait: “that which what is true of animals that is not true of humans that makes it okay to turn cows into hamburgers but not okay to turn humans into hamburgers”.

And your friend ponders this for a good moment. Your friend is sure he is a good person, so, in his quest to find an explanation, he stammers for a bit and vaguely sputters something out regarding intelligence.

You, a veteran trait-naming-dialogue-tree-aficionado have got him by the balls. Once again, you’ve been here before. You play your favorite rhetorical card: severely disabled children. “If it’s okay to beat a pig, is it morally okay to beat severely disabled children then? And is it really worse to inflict suffering on someone with the genius of Einstein than on either of us?“

Your friend pauses once more and reflects, but quickly stops this train of thought and after a brief pause decides to go all in. “Yes. It’s way worse to whip someone as smart as Einstein and no, even the most stupid humans are still smarter than pigs.”

You sigh, because yeah, even now he’s not on untrodden ground. You are just about to shift the conversation to how the kids are doing, when you realize you’re not the person you once were. Armed with the zeal of a thousand rationalist blog posts about how we shouldn’t try to ascend Moloch to heaven you start: “Wait! If that’s true… Isn’t it your moral imperative to try to grow god? Shouldn’t we be trying to make the smartest brain possible and have it replace all of humanity? Give all of our money to Sam Altman? Should we not be actively working towards building the fucking utility monster?” You want to follow up with a statement about granite cocks and how Disneyland wouldn’t have any children but you knew he wouldn’t understand.

Your friend is lost deep in thought. Not about veganism, but about why he even took your sorry ass to this pizza joint in the first place.

You try your best to practice the socratic method but you just. Can’t. Help it. “And shouldn’t we make Millions, no, googolplexes of these things?! After all, the more the merrier! Don’t you realize what you’re saying?! Don’t you realize that, taken to its logical conclusion, this means the eradication of the human race!? And if your Gods so desire, shouldn’t you allow them to beat you with baseball bats? If they want to eat you for lunch shouldn’t you let them? Or do you think moral consideration scales logarithmically with intelligence or something, because I’ll have you know that I’ve read articles on that too! Isn’t it OH SO CONVENIENT to place the barriers of moral consideration right where humans end and the rest begins? Ethics is weird man! I’d be surprised if we got to heaven, asked God what the highest impact thing that we could have done is, and his answer was “oh, something very normal and within the Overton window.” You immediately remember the source of that quote and briefly internally congratulate yourself for quoting it perfectly. Surely this is what peak intelligence looks like. The law of “wire together, fire together” takes over and you continue: “Scale matters man! Don’t you know that we kill 440 billion shrimp yearly? YEARLY?”

You did not mean to drop the S word. That’s strictly reserved to conversations with other vegans only. You’re in too deep now, might as well press on anyway.

“I have not read this much Bentham’s Bulldog to be outdone by some non-vegan, rationalist-virgin.” This is my moment! “WHY DO YOU WANT US ALL TO DIE SO BAD JOHN!!!!”. “IF YOU LOVE NICK LAND SO MUCH THEN WHY DON’T YOU MARRY HIM!!”

John takes a bite of his pizza. He is silent. You think about the pig that is now pepperoni that is now in his stomach. You’re breathing heavily. Everyone is looking at you.

And just like that, without any action in this engagement being able to be appropriately labeled “deliberate”, you know you’ve lost your only neurotypical friend.