Find our Sentientist Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.

Matthew Halteman is professor of philosophy at Calvin University and a fellow in the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. He wrote Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation and co-edited Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating (with Andrew Chignell and Terence Cuneo).  His latest book, Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan, was published in November 2024.

Matthew teaches and writes on twentieth-century European philosophy and applied ethics (especially animal and food ethics). To support and extend vibrant teaching, scholarship, and public education in animal and food ethics, he founded and convenes the Animals and the Kingdom of God Lecture Series at Calvin College and co-founded and convened the Wake Up Weekend festival. Matthew is also a member of the Philosophy as a Way of Life Network at the University of Notre Dame; a U.S. Observer of the Christian Ethics of Farm Animal Welfare Project at the University of Aberdeen, UK; a member of the board of directors for The Better Food Foundation and CreatureKind; and a member of the board of advisors for Sarx.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”

Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

00:00 Clips

01:12 Welcome

– Our Sentientism guest mutuals: Jasmin Singer, Mariann Sullivan, Christof Koch, Elan Abrell, Christopher Sebastian, John Sanbonmatsu…

04:19 Matt’s Intro

– “A kid from the mid-west – my people are agriculture people”

04:30 What’s Real

– “A Mennonite boy… anabaptist tradition of the Christian faith”

– “A group… who focuses much more on… the ethics than the meta-physics”

– “I remember being really surprised… to realise that other kids had different versions of the Christian faith”

– “The tradition I grew up in was really focused on… god is love and Jesus said… love god with all your heart… love your neighbour as yourself”

– “The question in my tradition… was ‘are you loving people’… unconditional love, unconditional grace… are you being the hands and feet of Jesus Christ on the ground”

– “My family… the group of Mennonite scholars that gets tapped to write the book about Mennonites… my dad was the Mennonite economist… my aunt was the Mennonite feminist theologian…”

– “My uncle… wrote a systematic theology… the Catholics and the Protestants had been doing this for centuries and the Mennonites were always focused on what happens on the ground… being the hands and feet of Jesus showing unconditional love to a suffering world.”

– “I’ve always thought that arguments about what is real tend to distract us from the real question… how do we show love to our neighbour… lifts up the people who are suffering… brings the people on the margins to the centre”

– “Culture wars… debates over worldviews… have not shown a very impressive track record of success in this regard”

– “We spend so much time fighting over what is real that we miss the fact that in a lived experiential way we have way more in common than we disagree about”

– “For finite, error-prone creatures like us the really interesting conversations are on the ground where we’re grieving, where we’re suffering, where we’re celebrating…”

– “I don’t really have a lot of time in my life to go to war about abstract questions… that cause more trouble than they’re worth when there’s people who won’t be able to eat by 2050 if we can’t transform this food system”

– Peter van Inwagen: ~”Human beings trying to do metaphysics is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It’s possible but it’s incredibly awkward…”

– Some naturalistic approaches: “a dismissive attitude towards modes of being, ways of life that admit more than just a fairly narrow conception of scientific method”

– “Science is not a monolith it’s a set of tools… any time somebody tries to turn a set of tools into a worldview I get concerned… a worldview is about identity not about inquiry”

– “Oftentimes naturalism is every bit as colonising in its outlook on the world as certain forms of religionism can be”

– “The Four Horsemen of Atheism… it looks to me they’re on a cultural mission… it’s not just curiosity and open inquiry… it’s ‘these other visions have done damage and… we need to shift people away from this religionism'”

– “What scientific toolkits can do is really impressive within certain very restrictive ontic regions… I definitely want science by my side when I need my cornea fixed… but when somebody’s died I’d rather have a poet or a priest next to me.”

– “When identity is the focus and it starts to look like an evangelical enterprise of converting people to being a Bright or converting people to being a Sentientist… then… it’s like every other ‘ism,’… if it’s about identity it really isn’t about open inquiry it’s about membership and I’m not really interested in the membership piece… it makes it harder to do things together”

– “I’d much rather talk about… in a lived, experiential way… what do we all have in common?”

– People denying climate change because of “identity protective cognition” rather than not understanding the facts

– “I’m a little bit impatient with the way the words ‘reason and evidence’ are sometimes used… browbeating people… with a sense of superiority…”

– “The conversation isn’t about what’s real the conversation is about a culture war – a worldview conflict”

– “What matters most to human beings is that tribal inclusion… comfort… security…”

– “Christianity’s not a monolith.”

– “Christ-following… unconditionally loving work of renewal in the world… transforming… to make the world a better, more beautiful place”

– Are we brains in a vat or living in a simulation? “That’s an interjection of the epistemological point of view… in a lived experiential way that is an objectifying infringement… when we’re simply living it that doesn’t show up until we’re at a distance from the experience…”

– Instead of “belief that” a more spiritual “belief in”… “this is where I cast the die”

– Nicholas Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga and Reformed Epistemology… “there’s a real experiential component, personally”

– “…but also that experience of love in community… the spirit of unconditional love moving in history… the way that I think of that is a Christian way of thinking about that”

– “Belonging to a people and feeling the movement of the spirit in my live… seeing that unconditional love leavens the world… when I act in the ways that Jesus suggests I act… not just loving my neighbours but even loving my enemies – doing good to those that hate us.”

– “I wonder what the world would be like if people actually lived into the things that Christ-followers say about what this vision is supposed to be about”

– Struggling in college – reading Rorty, Derrida, Heidegger, Nussbaum… “what these thinkers did was they helped me to contextualise… get out from the clutches of an enlightenment version of Christ-following… a jealousy of scientism”

– Apologetics “The only evidence there is is the kind that can be measured scientifically… to be taken seriously as a faith tradition… we’ve got to produce some pseudo-version of that kind of evidence.”

– “That’s worshipping at the very altar that you say you’re different from”

– “My approach has been to say… Where do I feel rooted?… Where do I feel the spirit of love anchoring me… I liturgically affirm… I cast the spiritual die with these people.”

– “Liturgical affirmation… We all have things that we sign on to with the spirit of our being.”

– “At some point if we want to be a functional part of a loving community… we bind ourselves to those groups through something like an affirmation of a vision”

– “It’s just wrong-headed to stand back and say ‘let’s atomise the vision… into these 360,000 propositions… see if we can check off every single one… that strikes me as an anaemic… bloodless way to think about what participation in a tradition is like.”

–  “I don’t believe in invisible pink hippopotamuses but I certainly don’t define my life around a culture war with people who do”

– “Culture wars with atheists have never been interesting to me… I like to learn from everyone…”

– “My library is full of books written by people all over the worldview spectrum and I think they’re at they’re best when they’re not defending the worldview”

– “We human beings do better when we focus on the things that either we have in common or that we disagree about where the rubber hits the road.”

41:15 What Matters?

– “Are you loving?”

– “If what is ultimately real is love… God is love… then what matters is to be loving… to align one’s loves with this unconditional, excessive, overflowing, grace-filled, divine love”

– Luna joins the call to workshop with us

43:05 Who Matters?

– Luna’s intervention as “The perfect instantiation of the question ‘who matters?’… her interests are demanding that we re-route our important plans.”

– “We’ve made tragic mistakes in the scope of that question ‘who matters?’ and we need to take immediate action to try to meet those needs.”

– JW: Does the moral imperative come from divine command or is it more independent?

– Being an ethical opportunist rather than picking a specific ethical system: “What’s the cash value on the ground… where does the rubber hit the road?”

– “All the different ethical theories have extremely important lived experiential intuitions that they do important service to… consequentialism… deontology… virtue theory… all of the above… consequences matter… good rules matter… the cultivation of virtue matters”

– “The tradition I grew up didn’t emphasise divine command as much… a kind of implicit virtue ethics where Jesus is the ideal practitioner… what would Jesus do?”

– “If we want justice and joy in our lives… then acting in as close to an unconditionally loving way as we can… is the best we can do”

– “The Mennonites have a strong anti-authoritarian streak”

– “Even the conception of the godhead is multiform”

– “Growing up resonating more with the person of Jesus than with the creator… made me not very much in tune with… creation – the earth and other animals… mattered very much… for me it was the human piece… very anthropocentric… who is Jesus spending his time worrying about?”

– “When I got to a reformed university where there was much more of an emphasis on the creator and creation and our mandate to care well for it… I suddenly realised… my focus on just service to other human beings maybe needs to be broadened out… the earth… other creatures”

– “It took coming into a reformed context for me to become an animal rights activist and anything like an environmentalist”

– “You can’t have justice for individual animals unless you’re working for environmental justice because flourishing is in flesh… unless you have that special matrix of air and soil and food and competition and community… you can’t flourish.”

– “When I thought of the environment as something separate from sentience it was hard for me to resonate with the need to be concerned with it – but when I saw the environment as the soil from out of which sentience springs… environmental justice is probably the beginning and the end of compassion for sentients.”

– “It’s given me a more expansive picture of what the creator piece of the puzzle [means]… someone who cares about the whole ball of wax and not just service to other human beings”

– A “complicated and long” journey… from a “died-in-the wool mid-western” experience… football team… weight-lifting… 3 sport athete”

– “[I was] Not at all concerned about other animals except in so far as you could cut huge slabs off them… and eat them like a sandwich”

– “I don’t know if I was ever a persecutor of vegetarians and vegans but I sure had a low opinion of them”

– “When I got to college… philosophy which was taught to me as ‘the lived pursuit of wisdom in your every day experience’ really broadened the scope of my interests.”

– “Seeing it as a way of life attracted me to elements of the philosophical tradition that were concerned with lived experience and not a kind of logic or disinterested perspective…”

– Studying phenomenology as a graduate student

– “I think some of my colleagues are cross… they hired me as a 19-20^th century French and Germanist… a few years into it I suddenly veered into this seemingly unconnected fascination with animal ethics”

– “In fact it’s a very straight line… if philosophy is concerned first and foremost with living the examined life then philosophy has to be committed into getting into those things that we’re not likely to be reflective about”

– “Food… this thing that we’re literally built out of… cultural identity… express ourselves socially… traditional foods… class… food is everything… shot through every last part – the physical, the social, the emotional, the intellectual and the moral”

– JW: “Bullets, Bible, Beef”

– “It never once occurred to me that one ought to be reflective about this… it’s like the language you grow up speaking or… the air that you breathe… it’s so fundamental to your being that it doesn’t show up as something to reflect about… it’s the last thing you want to look at because it’s incredibly painful… that fascinated me.”

– “I’m a philosopher. I’m 30 years old. There’s this thing that I’m doing every day without thinking about it at all… despite claiming that I’m trying to live the examined life… pursuing wisdom in my everyday affairs”

– “This system that produces this food that I love to eat is on a wide variety of fronts objectively catastrophic… that realisation just hit me like a bolt from the heavens… this is where I need to spend my time and focus.”

– “Interestingly phenomenology and hermeneutics… were the ideal training… they go underneath logic and epistemology – they ask abut the lived experiential soil from which our theoretical attitude can emanate.”

– “This is all about arguments… the arguments aren’t going to get us anywhere because we’re not good at reflecting on the food issues”

– “We’ll take a really hard look at the other worldviews but we’re not going to look at whether the vision we’re trying to live out resonates with the actions that we’re taking”

– “The standard analytic philosophical tools… logic… arguments… they don’t help… in fact they trigger identity protective cognition.”

– “It’s more important for them to identify with their group, double and triple down with that identity proposition in order to stay with the tribe” vs. “opens them to this risk of no longer fitting in”

– “’Hungry, Beautiful Animals’ is absolutely emanating from that hermeneutic tradition… but I try to do it in a way that people don’t have to have read Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida…”

01:03:02 A Better World?

– “If love matters most then paying really careful attention to the ways we articulate love in our communities becomes the most important thing”

– “I’m not interested in a colonising approach… going into other people’s traditions and saying ‘your tradition has to look more like mine’”

– “I am interested in learning… about what love and connection and joy look like to different communities… and then empowering”

– Self-help books and “this great cultural narrative of disintegration and disconnection and a lack of trust that makes it really hard to get together and do these bold things”

– JW: “At the same time people are desperate for meaning… these two relate… there may be an answer here!”

– Scepticism of grand theories of change… “Human beings like us who are finite and error-prone… I think we should train our imaginations on a grand vision… but then we should get to the incremental work… how do we bring this down to earth in the way that our particular, peculiar, very limited talents and gifts will allow?”

– “Going vegan is like an inner soil amendment that will enable you to scatter better seeds in where you’re going”

– “The disciplines we find to help us move incrementally towards those bigger visions… those are going to be different from community to community”

– The Good It Promises the Harm It Does “I was among the more conciliatory voices in the volume [re: Effective Altruism]”

– “If we really want to be efficient we’ve got to pay very careful attention to what efficiency looks like within the communities that are working for change – a one size fits all is not going to change the world”

– “There’s 5.8 billion people in the world whose ethical and spiritual visions are anchored in some religion… 2.2 billion of those people are Christians… a lot of people in the contemporary environmental, food justice and animal rights movement… let’s just say they haven’t had the most winsome and inclusive attitude.”

– “That might be well deserved… some of us Christians have not behaved in the most socially responsible ways lately…”

– “It seems very strange… to argue that the world needs to be changed in these radical ways… and not to empower the most sophisticated tactics and strategies possible for billions and billions of people”

– “There’s these areas where I think we should be putting very significant resources… Black Vegan ideas… Bryant Terry, Breeze Harper, Michelle Loyd-Paige, Aph and Syl Ko… their work is transformational… the holism… the emphasis on joy… it’s everything that a stringent focus on argumentation from a disinterested stand-point is not”

– “8% of African-Americans are vegans now whereas only 1-2% of the general population reports that”

– “No community is a monolith”

– “How do we think… about where the leaders are in each of these different places that we all call home… and how do we empower those people… give those people a platform… help the world to see that this is already who they want to be!”

– “There’s nothing really radical about a vegan vision of the world… it’s kindergarten ethics”

– “How horrified a parent would be if upon reading… ‘Charlotte’s Web’… their child was like… ‘I’m rooting for the butcher here… I’d like to see Wilbur carved up into chops’… parents would be absolutely horrified… you’d take your child to therapy…”

– “Why is it… we socialise… to be completely inoculated against concern for members of other species”

– “It comes easy to us when we’re very little to want a world where not just homo sapiens but everyone who draws breath and has an interest in flourishing gets to do that”

– “To be who we already believe we are… we need to move in this direction… to be more fully who we thought we already were we need to go vegan.”

– “We need to set our aspirations on our vision of the world… all-species kinship… and then we need to get to work… intimately understanding the workins of our own inner lives… our systems… then we go out into the world of living into those kindergarten ethics.”

– “You don’t have to have any radical transformation here… all you need to do is take a look at the beliefs, the feelings and the values that you’ve been striving to instantiate… on your best days… and what you’ll see is the vegan vision resonating back.”

– “I try to make a distinction between veganism… I worry about ‘isms’… [and] going vegan”

– Adrienne Maree Brown’s “Emergent Strategy“… “the messy beauty of transformation… many feet on many different paths”

– “I have a very pluralistic theory of change which is why at least initially I thought I was sceptical of EA (Effective Altruism)… it initially looked to me like EA was going to be one size fits all… I think there’s been a pivot… careful sensitivities to communal epistemologies.”

– “Other people’s vegan paths will look different… but wherever we are on that path we’re going vegan”

– “Somebody who takes the Bible seriously… an American baseline… the story I would want to tell… look at the grand theological sweep of the Judeo-Christian tradition… it’s not probably what you will have grown up in church… but when you really look at what the book says… what god intended for creation… what god hopes for from the redemption of creation…”

– “You’ve got Eden which is a vegan paradise… the first dignity bestowed on human beings by god… [was to] name and care for our fellow creatures…”

– JW: “Adam and Even weren’t hunting and chewing on steak”

– “When the permission to eat animals is given… I gave you Shalom and you blew it” vs. “Now god’s firing up the barbeque”

– “These creatures that you were supposed to take care of… now instead they’re you’re enemy… congratulations… it’s not at all a celebration…”

– “Meat-eating is degenerate in the Genesis account… it’s something that is reluctantly allowed on account of the fall from the Shalomic state”

– “In the end… the Holy Mountain… the lion laying down with the lamb – there isn’t even any predation”

– “Those are the book-ends… a veganic garden where if you want to be like god your first opportunity is to care for members of other species… and the holy mountain… in Isiah – the child will be playing in the asp’s den… a complete inversion of the animosity between and among the different species.”

– “In the beginning and the end… a vegan vision”

– “In the everyday on the ground… look for the fruits of the holy spirit… patience and kindness and long-suffering and faith and hope and love”

– “When I look at our contemporary food system… I’m hard pressed to think of something that is more out of resonance with the fruit of the spirit”

– “I can’t think of a more grave inversion of Eden than disenfranchised people (who Christians are told to bring the least of these to the centre)… and saying what you will do for a living is to repeatedly ignore the cries of mercy of thousands and thousands of fellow sentients… because we demand 220 pounds of meat per person per year”

– “In the beginning and when the redemptive work is finished – it looks like we’ve got something like all-species kinship as the vision… in the here and now… we should be headed in that direction too”

– “Judeo-Christian scripture is extremely complex… anyone looking for a super-highway to a very clear-cut ethic… is going to end up frustrated…”

– “On balance… the broad vision… the ideal… it’s clearly all-species kinship”

– “Maybe veganism isn’t possible [for everybody] but going vegan is absolutely possible… moving in the direction of that vision”

– Vs. identitarian / exclusionary / binary approach

– “Meeting people where they are and inspiring them to see the joy and fulfilment of becoming who they thought they already were”

– JW: All Sentientism groups are open to everyone: “We can agree to disagree about astrology or homeopathy or whether there’s a god, but when the rubber hits the road we can find practical, compassionate ways of moving forward together”

– “When you set the identitarian questions aside and stop arguing about whose worldview is right there’s this crazy shift that happens from a defensive posture to a curious posture”

– “In the comparative mode… I’m not going to be curious about the other person’s experience because it’s going to be a defeater for my own”

– “The minute I pivot… to curiosity about tactics… modes of inquiry… I can find these absolutely incredible and liberating practices from these other approaches”

– “As a Christian… I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Jain philosophy… Buddhist practices… meditation… I didn’t learn it in Sunday School.”

– “Pivot from identity to inquiry… the potential for collaboration is incredible… so exciting… you can feel the difference in a room where people are excited to learn from each other.”

01:35:56 Follow Matthew:

– “I love to get an email… I’m a teacher which means that first and foremost I’m a learner… let’s collaborate!”

– Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan
– Matthew’s Blog
– Matthew at Philpapers.org
– Matthew at Calvin
– Matthew on LinkedIn
– Hungry Beautiful Animals on Instagram
– Matthew on FaceBook

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