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

Dr. Brian Earp (@briandavidearp) is Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics & Health Policy & a Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. His work is cross-disciplinary, following training in philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, history & sociology of science and medicine, & ethics. He has written extensively on resisting traditional & religious justifications for causing harm – particularly to children through genital mutilation / circumcision. He wrote the book “Love Drugs” w/Julian Savulescu. Brian is also a professional actor and singer.

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

02:00 Brian’s Intro – Academically trying to understand the world & lay out how it should be.

03:04 What’s Real?

• Growing up in Seattle in a Free Methodist Evangelical Christian society
• Mum: Christianity & god. Dad: A more naturalist perspective
• “Evolution was something that might tempt us away from the path of righteousness”
• Unthinkingly accepting Christianity at first
• Asking questions of the pastor at 12/13 yrs. Is it fair to send people to hell who have never even heard of Jesus?
• The problem of evil… while being emotionally sensitive to the pain of others
• Taking “a very serious concern with morality” from mum’s Christian worldview even as a kid
• Divine command theory: things are right/wrong because god says so
• Agnostic re: metaphysics: “What do you mean by god?”
• The burden of proof is on the claimant… “Wow – how are you confident about that?”
• Bible college vs. secular Yale
• Studying philosophy at college
• The fundamental fact claims fell apart
• Ethical concerns: religious homophobia etc. The tension between strict religious rules & personal compassionate intuitions “something has to go here!”
• “Unless I have an independent reason to believe one view over another…”

15:37 What Matters?

• Supernatural worldview risks to universal compassion
• Can compassion go too far? Undermining justice/fairness?
• Agnostic about the grounding of ethics / meta-ethics
• Instead a Quinian web of beliefs & intuitions I’m pretty darn sure about: “Needless suffering of an innocent person”… “Treating people differently without reason”… “concern for the disadvantaged / those without power or representation” then reasoning about cases
• “We should believe what we have best reason to believe”
• Adding supernatural elements doesn’t seem to explain anything
• Personal experiences as evidence for the supernatural?
• A “new atheist” phase – needing that unbridled anti-religious fervour?
• “You can find dogmatism anywhere”: Political progressive or conservative, religious or atheist…
• Sentientism as ethically pluralistic
• “Why wouldn’t you grant moral standing to anything that can feel?”
• “Are there seriously people who deny moral standing to animals?”
• People agreeing with sentiocentrism in theory but not in practice
• Giving up eating meat 10 years after deciding it was a bad thing to participate in the system
• “It can’t be that bad – everyone is doing it!”
• “Some of the worst problems… things that are really bad but are widespread in social norms”
• Weirdness as a constraint on personal/social change
• The centrality of psychology
• “Social isolation was a death sentence for much of our history & still is for some today”
• “For a long time veganism was a freakish position – & nobody wants to be a freak”
• Inconsistencies: Being against pet cruelty but for animal farming. Against FGM but for male circumcision
• Culture drives most people’s morality, not the other way around
• Non-human animal ethics as kryptonite to otherwise careful thinkers (philosophers, humanists, atheists, rationalists)
• “Nobody likes hypocrisy but we’re all hypocrites”
• “In my cultural milieu people take it for granted that, at birth boys should have part of their penis removed… there are strong reasons to profoundly object to this practice.”
• Snark & righteousness… “it just didn’t work.” “People who already agreed were cheering. Those who didn’t completely dismissed my argument.”
• Persuading those who disagree: Shared ground. Respect.

51:50 How to Make a Better Future?

• There’s a role for righteous anger (vs. posturing on Twitter)
• Bringing people on board. Treat people as collaborators
• MDMA in the water supply?

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

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Thanks Graham for the post-production.