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

Neil is a professor of philosophy with research interests spanning philosophy of mind, psychology, free will, moral responsibility, epistemology, and applied ethics. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. From 2010, he was head of neuroethics at the Florey Institutes of Neuroscience in Melbourne.

He has written many papers and books, including “Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People“ (open access and free to read!)

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

• Is Neil a #Sentientist ?

02:05 Neil's Intro

• Perpetual winters between Oxford & Sydney
• Philsophy of applied ethics, free will, epistemology
• Neil's episode on #DecodingTheGurus re: intellectual virtue signalling

03:55 What's Real?

• Brought up #jewish "very much a cultural thing… synagogue twice a year" in #southafrica Africa
• Jewish Saturday school
• Moving to #Australia & attending religious school
• At 11-12 "This doesn't make much sense to me - this god business. I've been a convinced #atheist ever since"
• "Being religious can be perfectly reasonable"
• Subjective rationality "how well are you processing your evidence given where you are?"
• "People are much more rational than we think… even #QAnon supporters… they're completely wrong… but if they believe what they're saying… they're rational given where they start"
• #Trolling & #bullshit
• "We've got lots of evidence people don't believe what they're saying"
• #Determinism & #freewill & "the epistemic condition on responsibility"… "nobody does have that kind of control over their beliefs… they've done the best they can with the evidence available to them"
• "Criticism comes cheap… so does praise"
• "Luck explains so much" constitutive & present luck
• "It gives us more to do… of the sort of things philosophers aren't good at"
• Teaching critical thinking, logic, fallacies "people get better… but they don't get better at using it outside the classroom"
• "In the classroom I give you evidence… they stipulate it… you just accept it"… "But in the real world you're faced with the continual problem… should I trust the evidence?"
• A key reason people don't update beliefs given new evidence is because "they just don't trust the evidence in the first place… and you can formally model why they shouldn't… given what they already believe"
• The "capital punishment views" experiment
• "If somebody shows me a prima facie plausible study showing that… all dogs have 5 legs… I'm going to think… that it's bullshit"
• Bayesianism
• Gullibility, dogmatism, #skepticism
• #QAnon , #Antivaxx , #homeopathy : JW "The same individual is able to be completely gullible when it comes to one set of propositions… at the other extreme can be completely denialistic about another set of sources"
• "I don't like these terms… gullibility, open-mindedness, skepticism,
• Kripke's defending dogmatism re: #astrology
• Climate change denial: "Everyone should dismiss it… except climate change scientists… only if it makes some sort of sense should they engage with it"
• "We've got to rely on domain experts… then we've got to take their word for it… that does leave us vulnerable."
• Lysenkoism in the USSR causing crop failures "telling farmers to do things that didn't work"
• "What we've got to focus on is making sure that the political & social contexts are such that the domain experts can do their stuff"
• Risks of the hubris of experts: "They're lay people on everything else"
• "Have our own domains of expertise and have warranted relations of trust between domains"
• Some sympathy for the antivaxxers & climate change denialists "they can point to reasons why they shouldn't trust… some of those are good reasons"
• Even #vegan atheists aren't automatically right about everything else 🙂
• "The main reason I believe most of the things I believe is because someone I regard as reliable told me"
• "I think I'm right about lots of stuff - but that's not a reflection of my virtue - that's a reflection of my luck"
• #Moralluck

26:03 What Matters?

• "I'm anti-foundationalist generally" & giving up the idea of absolute certainty
• "I don't think we can have perfect actions"
• “We’re thrown into a world in which things have value for us… we can be sceptical of them… but the scepticism has less power than the value itself”
• Moore’s response to solipsism “here’s one hand… here’s another”
• “The idea that nothing matters… requires an idea of ultimateness that maybe doesn’t make sense… maybe ultimately nothing matters… the universe will suffer a heat death… That’s kind of sad but it’s not the perspective to ask about… [instead] Is my life going better or worse?… is the world going better or worse from the perspective of the beings in that world?”
• Why should we care about others? “I’m not sure that’s a challenge we should be in the business of trying to meet”
• Is morality ultimately selfish? “Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed”… “That’s a crass confusion of the proximate and the ultimate levels of explanation… the ultimate explanation might be because it’s in our interests to care… but that doesn’t mean we don’t care.” Just as sex might be ultimately about procreation but can also be about pleasure
• “You can explain things without explaining them away”

34:02 Who Matters?

• Assumed & implicit #Anthropocentrism
• “I think of at least some of them [non-human animals] as moral agents as well as moral patients”
• Insect & mollusc sentience?
• Two different bases for mattering morally: sentience & having a point of view
• Converting from continental to analytic philosophy
• Peter Singer’s “sentience is what matters for non-human animals… gives you a concern with suffering but not life”
• The idea that: “It would be fine… to get a kitten… make it’s life a good kitten life… and then painlessly kill it” and the #Thanos snap
• The reason painless killing of a sentient being is itself wrong is if that being has “a unified point of view”
• David Chalmer’s P-zombies “doesn’t have the capacity for phenomenality at all but has a point of view… I think would count as a moral agent and a moral patient… at least close to as morally significant as I am – maybe completely”
• “I think that phenomenality does less work than philosophers have thought”
• “I was at Monash University at a time when the entire philosophy department was convinced by Peter [Singer] that they should be vegetarian but almost none were.”
• “They found it difficult – I didn’t”
• “I did find it harder to give up cheese – which I did years later”
• “I have no lived sympathy with those people who say they find it really hard… these days in particular… At least if you’re living in the UK or Australia”
• “What doesn’t make it easy is social pressure… you know that veganism is highly stigmatised” 😊
• “Very online atheists are nothing like most atheists… they’re much more aggressive… maybe something like that is going on with veganism too”
• The parallels between journeys towards atheism & veganism re: intellectual / ethical thought vs. social norms
• How strongly held ethics can lead to warped epistemology
• The dangers of motivated reasoning (“veganism cures cancer!”) even if our motives are good

49:07 How Can We Make a Better Future?

• Would everyone adopting Sentientism solve all the world’s problems?
• “I don’t share your optimism… I’m actually quite deeply pessimistic… because of climate change… vested interests but also the collective action problem”
• “We’ve left taking it [climate change] seriously late and we’re now going to have to spend literally trillions on adaptations and, even so, there’s going to be a lot of death”
• “Veganism is one of the few things individuals can do that actually make a difference”
• “We need to take much better care of the environment… the natural environment… but also the institutional and social environment… and the informational environment”
• “Caring about other animals matters not just for their sake but for our own”
• Land use, emissions, zoonosis, pollution impacts of animal agriculture
• Structuring the informational environment to enable collective action and collaboration
• “Peer review in science is hugely flawed but… it has elements that can work… that needs to be rolled out across many different social structures… collective co-operation… that channels conflict”
• The airline industry’s safety culture: total transparency re: mistakes and a collective focus on not making them again
• Virtue epistemology “good thinking as dependent on character traits which are at once intellectual and ethical… like respect for arguments, respect for people, humility”
• “I’m not even sure ethics is a separate subject…”
• Free will and the philosophy of action
• “The things [epistemology & ethics] leak into each other.. they’re porous… they’re not things we should be trying to have hard and fast boundaries between”
• “The criticisms of virtue signalling are often overblown… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with indicating your values… as part of establishing trust relationships with each other”
• “It can become a kind of pathology when people build their entire identity around a kind of signalling of their good qualities”
• The danger of virtue signalling identity being driven by bad incentives (e.g. maximising the number of Twitter followers)
• “Bad Beliefs, Why They Happen to Good People” and many of Neil’s other papers and books are open access and free to read!

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.

Crystal is a veterinary practitioner, a journalist and an activist. She is the co-founder of Our Honor, a charity aiming to create an organized network of veterinary professionals who are able to challenge unethical institutionalised systems and amplify the voices of those who have been marginalised.

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

• "I'd love for these sorts of conversations to be had in #veterinary schools"
• "Should all vets maybe adopt a #Sentientism philosophy?"

03:21 Crystal's Intro

• "A veterinarian who kind of recently joined the animal rights movement"
• "This movement has kind of taken over my whole life"
• Full-time veterinary practice & founding Our Honor
• Empowering vets to "speak their conscience & confront systems of violence"
• Countering bullying & retaliation
• Compassionate Bay working on Californian legislation
• The California fur ban & global impact
• "It's quite astonishing - the resistance in the veterinary community to animal rights"
• The founding of veterinary practice in animal exploitation
• "They actively keep out anybody with an animal rights agenda from entering the profession"

06:36 What's Real?

• Growing up in an agnostic family on a farm
• Celebrating Christmas
• "What are you, Christian or Jewish?… like those were the only two options"
• Asking what happens when chicks die… "their soul goes to heaven"
• Young people's encounters with death "shocking & terrifying" "but I don't have that same sense of trauma from it… they're being released from this faulty body"
• "I have a very scientific mindset"
• Reading the Bible… being fascinated
• Arguing about organ donation
• Weddings: "the wife had to obey & submit… that didn't seem like something I could jump on board with"
• @ellendegeneres #ellendegeneres coming out & being attacked by religious homophobes
• Religion: maintaining hierarchy & power structures vs. people treating each other better
• "What if agnostics & atheists organised themselves - would they end up trying to oppress others?"
• "There are some big unanswered questions… why am I here… where does consciousness come from? Once you die, lights out… really?"
• "…consciousness is a supernatural thing? I don't know"
• Ontological & methodological / epistemological #naturalism
• "All models are wrong but some are useful"
• Sentience vs. consciousness
• #panpsychism "maybe… even an electron has a vanishingly simple #microconsciousness "… "we're all made up of sub-units of consciousness & within ourselves we have multiple consciousnesses" @EmersonGreen & Luke Roelofs episodes
• "I think masses of humans have a consciousness"
• The #combinationproblem in panpsychism
• Eric Schwitzgebel's "If Materialism is True, the USA is Probably Conscious"
• Quantum physics & consciousness?

35:46 What Matters?

• "Whatever it is, wherever it is, sentience matters"
• "For the best interests of all species"
• "I am kind of like one of those people who thinks plants matter… the best thing is not to feed them to billions of animals who are suffering"
• Our Matt Johnson @DirectActionEverywhere episode https://youtu.be/niiBZVatbcY
• "How do I not harm others?"
• Egoism, relativism, nihilism "forms of ethics that have abandoned morality"
• Happiness vs. interests? "I felt like interests was the better thing to go for"
• Do thermostats have interests? "I'm drawing a line at the thermostat… but plants have an interest"

47:07 Who Matters?

• #Anthropocentrism
• The USA #4H animal farming programme "They make kids raise animals for slaughter… millions & millions of kids are involved" & #FutureFarmersOfAmerica
• Raising #dairy goats "I learned… if my goat had a baby & that baby was a boy then I had to send them to slaughter"… "I said no - my goats were pets after that"
• Riding horses #dressage. Being told by an instructor "There's the noble class & the food producing class. Man's job is to subdue nature & turn it into something beautiful" "The horse elevates the human from a nasty, disgusting, 11 year old creep into a gorgeous ruler sitting on a throne"
• #Colonialism
• "We [humans] can recognise the suffering of others… we can heal the suffering of others"
• Intra-species animal compassion…
• In this pursuit of lack of suffering… we have caused great harm in #animalexperimentation"
• “Can we flip that script… nature is suffering… work for the best interests of all species”
• PETA materials “I guess some people don’t eat animals”
• Parental push-back re: health
• Leaving home then only eating plants
• Developing habits to exclude animal products
• Moving to Berkeley and meeting animal activists “we can actually change the world for animals in a relatively short period of time if we join together and organise”
• Civil, gay, women’s rights “we can create a vastly better world for all of us”
• Human worker exploitation in animal agriculture

58:26 How Can We Make a Better World?

• Flipping humanity’s role re: sentientity
• Animal advocacy as a social justice cause
• Human medicine’s purpose vs. veterinary medicine
• The AVMA oath “relieve animal suffering” but also “protecting animal resources” and feeding the public & providing medicines through animal agriculture
• “I was very naïve going in”… Talking about the human harms of animal testing & agriculture
• “This backlash & this pile on happens… huge resistance to this”
• Vegans / animal rights involved people being challenged when applying to vet schools
• Animal agriculture industry and animal researcher reps are on nearly every vet school admission board
• Denials of the land-use impact of animal agriculture & the reality of feed conversion ratios
• “Do they actually believe this?”
• “They do not want a discussion… it can’t be talked about”
• “I post things in veterinary FaceBook groups and I get blocked & removed”
• AVMA not responding to questions or journalists “They want to shut down the conversation”
• “Cherry-picking data, ignoring science to fit their agenda”
• “We are on the fringes… working towards the centre”
• Vets speaking out often need anonymity because of threats and bullying
• Terminal surgeries where students are forced to kill completely healthy patients “don’t need to happen”
• “This mindset that you have to be tough” as a counter to young student imposter syndrome
• Sexism and the “caring is a sign of weakness” mindset
• Hearing: “The only reason a woman enters vet school is because she’s looking for a rich husband”
• “There are more women but that culture is still sort of there”
• ~121,000 vets in the USA. ~57k are dog & cat vets. ~3800 are food animal practice. ~2600 are mixed practice. ~5900 academia. ~3200 in industry
• The Veterinarians against Ventilation Shutdown campaign: 1500 vets signed on “I think we have the numbers needed to make real change”
• Avian flu
• “Radical shifts in the veterinary profession” e.g. low cost access to care re: spay & neuter
• Good science. Messaging. Education. “Empowering other veterinarians to speak out… students too”
• “You will be viewed by the future & by your colleagues as innovators… do not let what anybody says right now to you dissuade you because you are on the right side of history”
• Are veterinary institutions now lagging behind public opinion when they could be leading?
• “Veterinary profession is very much siloed… we are living in our bubble”
• The California vet profession was against the declaw ban. “The legislators look to them as the experts on animals”
• Senator Cory Booker’s “Industrial Animal Agriculture Accountability Act”… “This industrial animal agriculture model gets all of the benefits and none of the blame”
• Ventilation shutdown “being cooked to death” by heat stroke “This was a constrained circumstance created by the industry… taxpayers ended up having to pay them for killing their pigs this way”
• 50 million birds killed using ventilation shutdown in the USA due to avian flu
• The AVMA failed to re-classify ventilation shutdown as “not recommended”. Then “shut us down completely” on the second attempt
• Working conditions in slaughterhouses & kill line speeds, self-inspections, use of prison laboour
• Amending the 1958 “Humane Methods of Slaughter Act” to cover birds, not just mammals
• “The animal industry is the most powerful lobbyist in our country”
• Public opinion vs. money & lobbying influence
• Big tobacco to big oil to big animal agriculture tactics
• “Veterinarians are merchants of doubt for the animal ag industry… We have to tell them they can’t use us that way”
• “I am optimistic… we have the numbers on our side”
• The AVMA… “Can we infiltrate it from the inside… or will we need to start a whole other thing?”
• Instead of “it should change but it won’t”… “All that’s lacking is hope!”
• If only fewer people were listening to Joe Rogan, Russell Brand and Deepak Chopra and listening to Sentientism instead… 😊

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.

Eva is the operations lead for the non-profit Pax Fauna. Pax Fauna exists to design a more effective social movement for animal freedom in the U.S., using original research as well as careful study of social movement literature and the recent history of the animal movement in order to reverse the cultural norm of eating animals. Eva has been organizing in the animal freedom movement since 2015 when she started working with DxE in Chicago, where she focused on building community, writing protest music, and compiling the movements’ songs into an online songbook used by advocates around the world. She started working full time as DxE’s legal coordinator in 2018, managing the organization’s many legal cases, organizing trainings, and orchestrating large artistic demonstrations. Eva has a deep curiosity about culture in all its forms, and how social movements engage with culture both internally and externally. Through songwriting, she has explored how music and art can shape the messaging and attitudes of the animal movement. Building on a background in Kingian nonviolence, she is a dedicated student of Nonviolent Communication, and she is committed to bringing NVC’s repertoire of creative problem-solving tools to the work of building a better culture in the animal movement. Working for years as a music therapist in hospice taught Eva how to apply metrics to aspects of life that are difficult to measure- and how to judge when metrics aren’t working to tell the whole story.

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
01:39 Eva's Intro

02:48 What's Real?

• "Growing up I definitely loved the supernatural… ghosts… god… mystical things"
• Raised #episcopalian, baptised, church "I remember really enjoying that"
• Considering confirmation but "starting to feel a little bit sceptical"
• 5th grade: Debating people online about religion
• "A sudden realisation… I don't actually believe all of this"
• Looking for purpose
• Identifying as an #atheist & focusing on the harms of religion (unaccepting, destructive, family rejections)
• "I still don't believe in anything that can't be falsified"
• "I'm really connected to the needs that can be met by religion…" working in an end of life hospice
• "My own spirituality… characterised by #nonviolence" a Kingian perspective, nonviolent communication
• Meeting the needs (community, morality)… without the supernatural
• Valuing acceptance & care for others led to hostility vs. some religious ethics
• #yoga & #meditation then finding "a more secular form of meditation"
• Using supernaturalism as a metaphor
• Naturalistic "spirituality"… "a felt sense of purpose"

13:20 What Matters?

• Non-violence: Getting away from black & white "right and wrong" thinking to "thinking about needs"
• Finding creative alternatives to meeting needs without violence
• Needs & strategies to meet them
• More fundamental needs: safety, sustenance, freedom from suffering
• #maslow 's hierarchy, Scott Barry Kaufman's sailboat @ThePsychologyPodcast
• Protective use of force. Justifiable force. "Nonviolence is definitely not #pacifism "
• Mourning unmet needs
• #retribution #restoration #deterrence & #justice & #punishment
• Feeling compassion even for perpetrators?
• "I don't believe that separating ourselves is going to help"
• JW "The only thing retribution does is cause more harm"

30:33 Who Matters?

• #vegetarian older sister
• Not thinking fishes could suffer
• #vegan at 13 "as an experiment… a discipline…"
• "First day of 8th grade… kids at school asked why… I really had no answer"
• Doing research "I felt a lot of horror at what I was reading"
• Pax Fauna study of meat eaters "it makes me feel bad & I try not to think about it"
• "I felt the same… but the way to not think about it was to keep eating vegan"
• Companion rats as a kid. Mum paying for their surgery "they were going to get the care that they needed"
• "She [mum] was annoyed [at Eva going vegan]" but adapted
• Taking the #LiberationPledge (not eating where others are consuming animal products). Family accommodate that "a sign of care"
• #biocentrism #ecocentrism #sentiocentrism "I think it's sentience - who can suffer"
• Uncertainty & prudence about sentience
• Plant, machine, insect sentience?
• Wild animal suffering "it matters, whether or not the problems are solvable"
• #Personhood for rivers etc. "a useful legal concept… morally it doesn't make sense to me"
• Denying sentience, denying harms (e.g. of farming/fishing), overriding interests
• Destroying the definition of "welfare" & "humane" & "compassion" & "care"
• #motivatedreasoning

50:25 How Can We Make a Better Future?

• Telling a story about "the world is moving away from these practices… we're moving"
• "I don't need to do these mental gymnastics"
• Sentience Institute surveys re: bans on slaughterhouses
• People holding two inconsistent beliefs at the same time (personal consumption choice & banning slaughterhouses)
• “It’s not about me going vegan… instead it’s about us as a society… a shift we want to do”
• Systemic, institutional, personal change
• Opportunities to get involved in the system change… “Then you don’t want to be a hypocrite”
• “For me veganism is a practice of personal integrity”
• “Experiences in activism are transformational… when I first got arrested… it allowed me to change my self-conception”
• “Bypass that whole futility question… just do work”
• Being prosecuted for rescuing three beagles
• “Open rescue is really important”
• Going inside farms breaks the distance
• Animal Save witnessing “it’s not abstract… making eye contact”
• Alternative proteins “I’m glad people are doing that work… it’s not me”
• Grass roots movements “really well positioned… to do cultural change work”
• Ballot initiatives “a really cool way to side-step the whole mess of the way the political system is right now”. A policy act and “a signal to the world”
• Oregon’s YesONIP13 initiative (David Michelson interview)
• Parallels of risks between animal activist & religious communities?: Deeply important overarching cause; ends justifying means; high control / high demand group & leadership dynamics; behavioural issues
• “Culture has to be a really huge part of the work… it’s primary”
• Intentional cultural interventions, training, managing conflict
• “How much we could achieve if we could really work together”
• “We attract people who’ve had some pretty intense alienation in the world”
• “Having any group that isolates people from their communities is really destructive… counterproductive”
• The difficulties of living amongst carnism & the risks of alienation and isolation
• “Chosen suffering for the sake of the cause is an important way to make change happen”
• “Metabolise suffering into meaning”
• “It’s hard to be optimistic… but grassroots movements have a lot of potential… we can make change happen… it feels worth putting a lifetime into”
• Pax Fauna are recruiting & have volunteer opportunities.

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.