Find our Sentientist Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here or on the Sentientism podcast here.

Mariann (@marisul) is Co-host with previous guest Jasmin Singer of the Our Hen House podcast and host of the Animal Law Podcast. She is a lawyer, lecturer, teacher and animal rights activist.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.”

Find our Sentientist Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here or on the Sentientism podcast here.

We discuss:
0:00 Welcome

1:40 Mariann’s Intro. An Animal life

• Working as a lawyer in New York
• Adopting a dog on impulse then waking up to animal issue
• “He’d stopped eating meat because of the way animals were treated – and t was just like ‘boom!'”
• Most people know there’s a problem – they just avoid thinking about it
• Joining (later chairing) the Animal Law Committee of the NY bar
• Connecting animal advocacy organisations
• Meeting Jasmin Singer & starting Our Hen House

6:02 What’s Real?

• Growing up Catholic
• “I had faith but it was never a burden for me”
• Not really being religious any more… “but those voices never really go away”
• As a teenager “It just started to seem unlikely”
• Getting comfortable with “I don’t know”
• Ethics & evidence as reasons for abandoning supernatural worldviews
• The tumult of Catholic college in 1968. From dressing for dinner & attending church to “men with beards living in the dorms”
• “Boom – the entire world changed – everyone was questioning everything”
• Leaning towards atheism but not being certain
• “We’re connected to each other in ways we don’t understand”
• Non-sentient living things
• Woo! vs. naturalistic views of sentience & consciousness
• Finding awe in a naturalistic worldview

18:01 What Matters?

• “It’s all about suffering”… and about pleasure too
• Suffering matters… “It’s so obvious”
• “What kind of god – would create this planet – where animals eat each other”
• Morality as compliance vs. concern for suffering/flourishing
• Reading Peter Singer. He wrote down what many were already feeling
• “Why did I get there and everybody doesn’t get there?”
• “I don’t think it’s a philosophical problem… it’s a psychological problem”
• “How can you not sound self-righteous when you’re right?”
• “I don’t understand why this is this big moral journey”
• The “all we have to do is tell everybody” stage of activism
• The family & social challenges of going vegan
• The risks of motivated reasoning even within a naturalistic worldview

28:48 The Future

• Balancing despair & hope with the help of Our Hen House
• Things have shifted. “It’s almost as if we have won the moral argument already.”
• Using the need for institutional change as an excuse for personal inaction
• “It seems so obvious that personal veganism is part of the process”
• Being vegan has so much more influence than just what you eat
• Melanie Joy’s carnism – normal, necessary, natural, nice…
• “Maybe we’re just weird”
• Social justice
• Denial “is going to be our doom”
• Tribalism & dogma
• Personal, institutional, legal, transition levers of change
• Alternatives to animal products aren’t enough
• We need to “get the meat out of people’s ears they can start to hear these arguments”
• Carol Adams: “Don’t have this argument at the dinner table”
• Can religious compassion help with non-human animal ethics? Ahimsa
• “How can religious people ignore this fundamental moral issue?”
• The Animal Interfaith Alliance
• “Whatever lever you can pull… we need them all”
• “We’re trying to change the way the entire world works”
• Greenwashing, ethicswashing, humanewashing
• People need to hear the stories of animals
• Anthropomorphism vs. “they are voiceless”
• Alexa chips in on artificial sentients
• How individuals can drive institutional/systemic change
• “Obviously personal & institutional change go together – that’s how change happens”
• Rising Anxieties & animal agriculture: “They’re frightened of us”
• “What else are you going to do with your life?”
• “Our audience is just grief stricken – it’s overwhelming – we just put it aside every day… what else is the cure?… only to try to do something about it”
• “If we could take this scourge [animal farming] off the face of the earth”
• “We just have to get everybody to agree with us!”
• The law is a conservative institution, but look at Steve Wise’s work re: personhood!

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info.

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Thanks Graham for the post-production.