John is a professional animal advocate & public speaker. You can support his work at https://www.patreon.com/JohnOberg and follow him at https://twitter.com/JohnOberg.
In these Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, commitment & compassion for all sentient beings."
Full show notes and the video of our conversation are here: https://youtu.be/UTZlwC4nHq8. The podcast version of our conversation is here.
We discuss:
- John's career in animal advocacy and vegan advocacy
- "It's been the best change of my life
- it's given my live a lot of meaning & I've made a big difference for animals."
- Helping other advocates & organisations to be effective via social media
- Messages being seen by 10's of millions of human eyes
- Growing up in the mid-West, but in a fairly non-religious context
- We generally assumed God exists, but it was rarely talked about
- Thinking at 14 "This doesn't make any sense - I'm an atheist!"
- Going through a "militant" atheist phase - then softening to just being open minded... "I don't rule anything out"
- The challenges of coping with family illness & death. Recognising the pull of the hope of an afterlife
- Given there are so many thousands of religions, amazing how someone can be so sure theirs is the right one. It's just what they were taught as a child
- How the "golden rule" & broad themes of compassion pre-date, then run through most religions
- How naturalism needs to be humble & open minded (even to crazy ideas)
- Avoiding the arrogance of dogma even within atheist/skeptic/naturalistic worldviews
- Withholding belief until there's evidence. Being comfortable not knowing until then
- "A Meaningful Life" and "The Animal Activist's Handbook" by Matt Ball, founder of Vegan Outreach
- The meaning of life is about 2 things: The pursuit of pleasure and joy and the avoidance of pain and suffering (the latter being more important)
- Considering the visceral reality of suffering and the imperative of reducing it
- The mind-blowing scale and severity of farmed animal suffering
- Focusing on helping people align their behaviour (e.g. eating decisions) with the ethics they already have (not wanting to cause suffering)
- Veganism is easier than ever
- The rich range of flourishing and suffering sentient experiences - How supernatural ethics can see needlessly causing suffering/death as morally good!
- The good intentions, but the dangers of relativism
- Isn't a naturalistic grounding for our ethics (sentience) more solid?
- Companion animal relationships already demonstrate how most people don't want to cause non-human sentient suffering
- Just apply your companion animal ethics to the animals you're eating!
- If I wouldn't cut my dog or cat without anaesthetic, why would I pay someone else to do that to a pig
- "I considered myself an animal lover but I ate them, 3 times a day"
- A friend said: "If you consider yourself an animal lover you should probably stop eating them."
- I initially thought farmed animals had a pretty good life with one bad day
- Watching "Earthlings" http://www.nationearth.com/
- Helping non-human animals will be good for humans too (AMR, zoonosis, climate)
- "If a being can't experience pain, I don't see why that matters" - Environments are important because of their impact on sentient beings
- Most environmentalism reflects human concerns, so ignores most farmed/wild animals
- "If you hand most people a knife they won't stab a cow with it"
- "People don't want to believe that they're bad people", so they have to convince themselves the things they're doing aren't bad
- "We have to chip away at the walls people have built up - we can't demolish them overnight"
- Veganism is easier now than it ever has been. Socially and practically
- We need to make it as easy as possible
- Plant-based and clean meats will ultimately do the most for farmed animals
- New tech alternatives often render harms redundant quicker than moral development
- Things could be looking brighter for animals everywhere
- The practicalities of a #JustTransition for animal farming
- The answers are obvious, ethically and practically - so we just need to get on with it.
You can find John at https://twitter.com/JohnOberg, https://www.facebook.com/JohnObergOfficial and https://www.johnoberg.org. You can support him via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/JohnOberg.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at https://sentientism.info/. Join our "wall" https://sentientism.info/wall/ using this simple form: https://sentientism.info/im-a-sentientist.
Everyone interested, Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our groups. Our main one is here on FaceBook.
Thanks to Graham for his post-prod work. Follow him: @cgbessellieu
Find our Sentientist conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.
Peter is often referred to as the “world’s most influential living philosopher.” He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secular, naturalistic, utilitarian perspective. He wrote the books "Animal Liberation", Why Vegan? and "Animal Liberation Now!" (launched on the same day as our Sentientism episode - join his speaking tour here!), in which he argues against speciesism and for a shift to plant-based food systems and veganism. He also wrote the essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" and the books "The Life You Can Save" & "The Most Good You Can Do" which argue for effective altruism - using evidence & reasoning to do the most good we can for all sentient beings both human and not.
In 2004 Peter was recognised as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. In 2005, the Sydney Morning Herald placed him among Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals. Singer is a cofounder of Animals Australia & the founder of The Life You Can Save. In 2021 he received the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. Peter donated the $1 million prize money to the most effective organizations working to assist people in extreme poverty and to reduce the suffering of animals in factory farms.
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.” The audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
06:12 What's Real?
26:25 What Matters?
38:58 Who Matters?
01:10:05 How Can We Make A Better Future?
Following Peter:
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info.
Join our “I’m a Sentientist” wall using this simple form.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on Facebook.
Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon.
Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism podcast and here on the Sentientism YouTube.
Michael is head of philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His current work spans transhumanism, death and meaning. He has written on whether non-human animals can have meaningful lives and What It Is Like to Be a Bot. He says of his work: “As a philosopher, I am a generalist, which is a nice way of saying that I have done many different things and I am not really an expert on anything in particular. Most people would probably tag me as an ethicist, but this is only true in a very broad sense. Figuring out what is right and what is wrong, permissible or impermissible, does not hold much interest for me. It seems to me that when people are debating these questions they are actually arguing about something else, namely who we want to be and in what kind of world we want to live. For me, doing philosophy is ultimately a sustained attempt to get to grips with this “deeply puzzling world” (to borrow an expression of Mary Midgley’s), to understand it and to understand our place in it. Philosophy is not business; it’s personal, more akin to therapy than to science. It’s about finding out what is actually going on and what we are doing here. Can philosophy provide an answer to these questions? I don’t know. All we can do is keep on trying. Perhaps what matters is not that we find an answer, but that we keep the question alive.”
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.” The audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:42 Michael's Intro
06:06 What's Real?
29:03 What Matters?
45:35 Who Matters?
01:26:44 How Can We Make a Better Future?
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info.
Join our “I’m a Sentientist” wall using this simple form.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on Facebook.
Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon.
Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.
Elan is a cultural anthropologist focusing on human-animal interactions, environmental justice, and food politics. He is assistant professor of the practice in environmental studies and coordinator of the animal studies minor at Wesleyan University. He is the author of the Gregory Bateson Prize winning book: "Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care". He also contributed a chapter called "The Empty Promises of Cultured Meat" to the book "The Good it Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism".
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.” The audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:25 Elan's Intro
02:42 What's Real?
17:00 What Matters?
26:21Who Matters?
49:43 How To Make a Better Future?
Following Elan: @ElanAbrell, buy “Saving Animals”.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info.
Join our “I’m a Sentientist” wall using this simple form.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on Facebook.
Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon.