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

Tobias (@TobiasLeenaert) is an author & a vegan advocacy consultant. He blogs at Veganstrategist.org & wrote “How to Create a Vegan World”. He is the co-founder of ProVeg International. He is an Effective Altruist – thinking about the best ways to achieve a compassionate society. He also describes himself as a “Slow opinionist”.

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.” As well as the video above, the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple and here on the other platforms.

We discuss:
0:00 Welcome

1:28 Tobias’ Intro – A life of vegan advocacy

• Setting up EVA, then “meta-activism” helping other activists be more effective

2:37 What’s Real?

• Being confirmed as a Catholic & attending Catholic school because “that’s just what you do”
• Defending rational & scientific worldviews
• “I’m not the most devout atheist you can find”… there’s a possibility there’s “something more”
• Could religious visions one day be made real through technology? Reincarnation, heaven, creation/simulation?
• “Maybe religious ideas are perversions of what is technologically possible”
• Science fiction
• Hallucinogenics & “religious” experiences
• The hard problem of consciousness vs. “it’s just what doing this sort of info processing feels like”
• The echoes of religious ideas even for those who no longer believe. The Exorcist” movie

15:34 What Matters Morally?

• Being raised as an ethical person. Volunteering at 12 yrs old
• A teenage phase of being less morally engaged, then “it came back – especially with animals”
• “That empathy was there always – without needing a system of rules”
• Emotional & rational bases for compassionate ethics
• “You can be a vegan sociopath”… decide rationally to act compassionately without feeling empathy

22:12 Extending moral consideration to non-humans

• Loving companion cats and dogs at home as a child
• Wondering what’s the difference between them & cows we eat
• “If I can’t answer that question I have to stop eating animals”
• Taking 10 years to go vegan even after that realisation
• The power of taste preference… overcoming intertia
• Making a bet to go without meat for a month. Then carrying on
• Empathy, reasoning, then practice
• “Making compassion easier”
• Peter Singer’s shallow pond thought experiment
• Anthropocentrism, sentiocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism
• Wild animal suffering & artificial sentients
• “I don’t see the point in going beyond sentientism – only sentient beings can suffer by definition”
• The dangers of environmentalists granting moral consideration to species or populations that have no concerns & can’t experience
• By definition suffering is bad
• Sentientism as the only moral discrimination?
• Environmentalism often being a veneer on anthropocentrism
• Humans appreciating the aesthetics of the wild but not the suffering within it
• Taking the perspective of the other
• Imagine extreme suffering & you won’t philosophise – you’ll just say “please help me”
• The most important interests & needs are the most common across species
• Why even many vegans have a blind-spot re: wild animal suffering
• Consequentialism, utility, virtue, deontology & care ethics
• Do the general public care about wild animal suffering more than vegans?
• “Many people have replaced god with nature”
• Theodicies & the brutality of “nature”

46:55 The Future

• It’s simple & obvious that we should stop killing & exploiting animals… maybe this century
• Tech alternatives, awareness, behaviour, then norms will shift
• “If people have to make too much effort – it won’t happen”
• “We can create bliss for humans – but how do we do that for other sentients”
• Decisions re: companion, liminal & wild animals. How many & how will they live
• Population control, suffering alleviation
• Re-wilding. Trophic chains and suffering levels
• “We are the only ones who can do it… If you want a universe without terrible suffering… you need at least one intelligence to be raised to an incredible, advanced level.”
• Toby Ord’s “The Precipice” doesn’t mention the human role in caring for other sentients
• “That’s one reason we shouldn’t go extinct”
• Alien & artificial sentience
• “I would say we should not develop artificial sentience”… the chance of massive suffering is quite high

57:07 Vegan Advocacy

• Risks of welfarist dead ends & ethics-washing
• Incrementalism with a clear abolitionist goal
• More aggressive tactics will become more fruitful as alternatives become easier

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

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Thanks Graham for the post-production.