Find our Sentientist Conversation here on YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.

Helen (@hkopnina) is Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Business at the Uni of Northumbria & The Hague Uni. Her research focuses on environmental education, biodiversity & corporate sustainability.

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 elsewhere.

We discuss:
00:00 Welcome

01:12 Helen’s Intro

02:49 What’s Real?

• The passage to caring about ecosystems for many ecocentrists was through a connection to individual animals
• Growing up atheist “just like everybody else in the Soviet Union” in Moscow
• Parents who were “wild about wilderness”
• Visiting Siberia “in the summer & without gulags”
• “I loved fairy tales” but firmly naturalistic
• “I’m still 99% atheist with 1% reserved for doubt”
• Political dissident parents, pushing back on ideology
• “When you don’t have religion you create a religion yourself – & that was communism… we had Lenin & Marx as our gods…”
• Lenin, Marx & Engels as a “holy trinity”?
• “My parents instructed me that it was bullshit”
• Naturalistic ontology (no supernatural) & epistemology (use evidence & reason)
• Flat earth, anti-vaxx, one party states…

13:45 What (& Who) Matters?

• Kant, deontology, consequentialism…
• “You can call me a cynic – I don’t think there is any absolute morality – I think we invent it.”
• Injustice & unfairness
• Frans de Waal’s fairness experiments with chimps
• “Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are all about us humans” (vs. https://sentientism.info/how/sentientist-development-goals)
• “Why don’t we have the same moral consideration for billions of other living beings – it just seems inconsistent… unjust”
• Environmental Justice isn’t about the env. its about distribution of goods & harms among humans
• Wokeness, fairness, division & distribution. The risks of forcing pure equality (e.g. Soviet Union – bloody revolution then a new elite emerges)
• Avoiding relativism & nihilism. Can we construct a universal morality?
• The impacts on Soviet Union of WWII then Stalin
• “I see our planet as one of billions – so it doesn’t really matter”
• Anthropology & cultural relativism “why is human sacrifice & cannibalism a good thing?”
• Moral progress “but things can be turned back too”
• Survival & reproductive rationales for morality “Otherwise you get beaten up”
• “Anger at inconsistency… it pisses me off that it just applies to one single species”
• Writing picture novels as a child “Animals don’t want to be in cages or eaten… There’s something strange going on… the way we treat them… something has to be done”
• Feminism: “I’m just not interested to be honest”
• “There was no such thing as veganism in the Soviet Union”
• “If you don’t do it it doesn’t matter at all – there are 8 billion others”
• “I’m not vegan, I’m a flexitarian… I can even eat meat… although the last time I did was a long time ago”
• Can the drive to reduce our individual impact go too far? Guilt, nihilism, even suicide?
• “If I’m too strict myself… I get so angry at them… & at the whole world”
• “What’s the most efficient way for me… to influence… open-minded dialogue”
• “children are the worst thing you can do for the environment… even if you bring them up well”
• “I actually feel more comfortable sinning a bit”
• “Not talking to the converted”
• Recognising the value in our own sentient flourishing. Not just minimising impact
• The pros & cons of every consumption decision vs. the explicit suffering & death caused through animal products “the victim is there on the plate”
• “Some of us are predators… the lion shouldn’t feel guily about eating an antelope”
• Leopold’s Land Ethics
• Natural predation vs. industrial agri
• Animal rights/welfare
• “I do see us human beings as part of nature… we’ve become a kind of cancer… like a virus”

53:14 How Can We Make a Better World?

• J. Baird Callicott’s “A Triangular Affair”
• “Individuals comprise species & species comprise ecosystems”
• Ecocentric & sentiocentric common fronts (win-wins) & common enemies (e.g. animal agri)
• Invasive species
• Hierarchies of sentience vs. pure egalitarianism
• “My daughter is much more harmful to the environment than an earthworm”
• Ethical progress & regression
• Afghanistani Taliban
• Learning from indigenous & non-western ethics
• Animals in politics & law
• Ecocide
• CSR/ESG in business
• Family planning & population taboos
• Degrowth business models

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

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Thanks Graham for the post-production.