Jessica Pierce (https://www.jessicapierce.net/​) is a bioethicist & writer. Her work focuses on human-animal relationships & interconnections between ecosystems & health. Her “All dogs go to heaven” blog at Psychology Today is here​.

In these Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?” Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is on the Sentientism Youtube here and you can find the podcast versions here on Apple ​and on all the other platforms.

We discuss:

• Training in philosophy & religious studies
• How ethics intersects w/biomedical science
• Working for 10 years in medicine
• Medicine can damage and enable health
• Shifting to focus on non-human animal ethics
• Companion animal relationships & the experience of losing Ody
• The parallels between non-human animal & human care/ethics
• Breaking the default assumption that “humans are the raw materials of ethics”
• Growing up in an “outdoorsy” family in the Sierras & Colorado
• Attending Buddhist temples, synagogues, churches. A wide variety of religions
• Finding kernels of truth in every tradition but “you don’t want to get stuck in one”
• Studying religion from undergrad to phd
• “How is someone with a phd in religion an atheist?” “When you study religion it turns you that way.”
• Not rejecting the theist traditions, but also not embracing them
• If there is some “god” (with a small “g”) then it’s in nature and if there’s a “heaven” then its a state of mind, a state of being in harmony and peace.
• “Humans are not the centre of the universe”
• Our attitude that we can just exploit and use the world is an offense
• “I would put myself in that camp of naturalism”
• The appeal of pantheism
• The trap of human arrogance (both scientists and religious people seeing humans as “like gods”)
• The need for humility, respect & non-violence. Treading lightly
• Humility & open-mindedness and doubt are the power of naturalism and science
• John Gray’s “Straw Dogs”
• The naive assumption that once we see animals as sentient that will solve all of our problems
• Jessica’s book “The Animals’ Agenda” https://www.jessicapierce.net/books
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• Showing slaughterhouse footage to animal ethics students, seeing their distress, then hearing them say “but I really like steak”
• Recognising the moral value of someone (as with humans) doesn’t automatically solve all problems
• Facts and ethics as reasons for leaving religion “these are not deities I want to worship”
• Compassion & its evolutionary roots
• A sense that even rocks have value and a “lifecycle”
• Ethics as intuition followed by rationalisation to justify those intuitions (some of which aren’t that good)
• Mindfulness emerging from compassion
• “Compassion without attention to the details can backfire”
• People feel compassion for companion animals, but if they don’t understand the needs and perspective of the companion they can cause harm
• Trying, however imperfectly, to take the perspective of other sentient beings
• “Saving” worms from the sidewalk as a child, then seeing them drown
• Sentience as information processing, maybe with a fuzzy boundary vs. non-sentient information processing
• The need for humility & prudence re: which entities are sentient
• A sense of reverence can go beyond sentience
• The choice between eating a plant & an animal is clear. It doesn’t hurt the plant
• Caring about “ecosystems” & Gaia but still eating obviously sentient beings
• Actions are more important than rationales. Causing less suffering is good whatever the reason
• Why “vegan” is off-putting, “a dirty word” to many people
• Climate change is a “less threatening” story than animal ethics for those who consume animals. The implications of what we have done is a “powerful pill to swallow”
• A future where people have compassion for other beings & become more scientifically oriented
• Is animal consumption necessary for survival in some places?
• People going to KFC probably don’t even consider that they’re consuming an animal
• Don’t educate kids about nature through capturing it, teach through going out into it
• How would dogs live without humans (forthcoming book with Marc Bekoff)
• Pet-keeping (captivity) would go away in a utopian future
• Non-animal research alternatives
• Ending zoos
• “Compassion isn’t a limited commodity – The more you build the more you have”
• “If we can learn to treat animals better we’ll learn to treat each other better”.

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info​​​​​​​​​​​​​​. Join our “wall” https://sentientism.info/wall/​ using this form: https://sentientism.info/im-a-sentientist​. ​Everyone interested, Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our groups. Our main one is on FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/groups/sentientism​.  Thanks Graham for you post-prod work: https://twitter.com/cgbessellieu.