Find our conversation on the Sentientism YouTube and Podcast.

Kyle (@KyleJohannsen2 and on PhilPeople) is Adjunct Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Queen’s University. His research is in social & political philosophy, & in animal & environmental ethics. He teaches normative ethics, metaethics, bioethics, business ethics, cyberethics, the philosophy of law & critical thinking. He is the author of “Wild Animal Ethics“.

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.” In addition to the video above, the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple and here on the other platforms​​​​​​.

We discuss:
0:00 Welcome

1:22 Kyle’s Intro

• Catia Faria’s (and @catiaxfaria) dissertation on wild animal suffering

2:25 What’s Real?

• Growing up Roman Catholic. Attending catholic schools. Believing in god.
• “I didn’t like being Catholic. I found it very restrictive… I didn’t like having to pray – it felt fruitless”
• Ethics was being thought about but “I didn’t like the conservative values” e.g. abortion, contraception, sex
• “It just struck me as false.”
• Catholicism did leave the impression that it’s important to think about morality
• Majoring in philosophy

8:25 What Matters?

• “Morality is objective”
• “Even relativists behave like morality is objective… why would you argue unless there were some right answer?”
• Even under objective morality duties vary by context
• Moral objectivism doesn’t have to imply moral realism
• Consistency, coherence, flourishing, co-op as potential groundings
• Goods (welfare, resources, health, relationships), functions (distribution, efficiency, increases) & constraints (respect) values
• “I don’t know if pleasure always wins out”
• Pluralism within Sentientism

21:15 Moral Scope? Sentience

• Anthropocentrism, Sentiocentrism, Biocentrism, Ecocentrism
• Sentientism as Sentiocentrism & Naturalism
• Sentiocentrism itself implies naturalism. It conflicts with many supernatural/religious worldviews (e.g. soul as basis for moral value, use of science to assess sentience)
• Hard cases of marginal sentience (brain injury, foetal development, simplest animals)

28:27 The Journey to Sentientism

• Taking a PhD animal ethics course taught by Will Kymlicka based on Zoopolis
• Concluding that “Sentience is the correct criterion for inclusion in the moral community”
• Pluralism re: various goods. But sentience is a condition for the non-welfare elements to count as good (e.g. health only matters if the being cares about being healthy)
• “Veganism is a moral requirement if sentiocentrism is right”
• Going vegan during the PhD. Cutting out animal products over 8 month transition. Finding social support

32:36 Biocentrism, Ecocentrism?

• Indiv. biocentrism (e.g. blades of grass), holist biocentric (e.g. species), ecocentrism (e.g. ecosystems)
• “I’m really sceptical of these views” – a veneer for anthropocentrism
• Are these things valuable or valued? The reasons for wanting to value them tend to be very anthropocentric
• Environmental pragmatism “seems crazy to me”
• “Expanding the moral community should have big practical implications” as it does within humanity
• Biocentrism & ecocentrism are trying to put a progressive veneer on anthropocentrism. Trying to make it look progressive when its not
• Wild animal suffering exposes tensions between environmental & sentiocentric ethics. Dropping the “appeal to nature” fallacy resolves some of the tension
• “That’s moral progress – you have to interfere in things”
• Most bio/ecocentrists grant no practical moral consideration to farmed animals

41:13 Wild Animal Suffering

• Thinking about wild & farmed animals from day one (for most, wild animals come later)
• Effective Altruism: scale, tractability, neglectedness
• Most wild animals are “r-strategists”. Short, painful lives
• The need for more research re: tractability
• Gene drives (e.g. amp nociception but reduce the affect of pain)

51:49 The Future

• Anthropocene: humans are the main thing influencing the natural world
• Duties of justice
• Contraception/vaccination
• Looking for win-wins e.g. Elimination of the screw-fly parasite
• “Veganism frees us to care about wild animals”
• Ending animal farming enables re-wilding. But low/high suffering ecosystems?
• Consistent moral consideration for non-sentients makes human discrimination less likely
• Non-biological sentience (AI) & S-risk?

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at sentientism.info​​​​​​​​​​​​​. Join Kyle on our “I’m a Sentientist” wall.

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Thanks Graham for the production!