113: “We are reflective animals – which comes with responsibility” – Susana Monsó – Sentientism

We discuss the biggest questions: "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?" with scientists, celebrities, activists, writers and philosophers. The Sentientism worldview is "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." It's a simple, yet radical, philosophy that's grounded in reality (naturalistic epistemology) and has compassion for all sentient beings (mostly human and non-human animals). Naturalism & sentiocentrism combined.

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Susana is an assistant professor based at the Department of Logic, History, and Philosophy of Science of UNED, working on animal ethics and the philosophy of animal minds. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Complutense University of Madrid, an MA in Global Ethics and Human Values from King’s College London and a PhD in Philosophy from UNED, Spain. She has been a post-doc fellow at the University of Graz and at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna. Susana describes her research interest as focusing on “what animals are capable of feeling, thinking, and doing, and what this means for the sort of treatment that we owe them.”

Susana led the project “Animals and the Concept of Death” which culminated in her book, “La Zarigüeya De Schrödinger” or “Schrödinger’s Possum”.

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 video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

00:00 Welcome

01:46 Susana’s Intro

– Vienna & Madrid cultures re: animals & veganism

03:57 What’s Real?

– Growing up in a 100% atheist household. Unusual for 1980’s Spain

– “I used to think of god as a woman” but “I never had it as a belief”

– No religious education… “It’s a little bit sad”

– “It’s always been very natural to not have god as part of the explanation”

– Some sense of shame about not being religious as a kid but “I quickly grew proud of my beliefs”

– Attending an international private school with rich kids “I knew I was different”… incorporated being an atheist into that difference

– Superstitions “Just in case” 🙂

12:51 What Matters?

– “I want to believe in moral realism – I don’t want to be a relativist”

– “Sentience is definitely something that provides a good grounding for ethics & moral status”

– “I feel like something is left out if we focus excessively on sentience”

– Agency as a potential moral grounding? “Something that ought to be respected about agency”

– Wilcox: “agency & sentience are co-extensive”

– “Harms beyond sentience?… ways of wronging animals that don’t correlate with subjective feelings”: dignity, preventing from relations / developing capacity

– Drawn to objectiveless accounts of wellbeing more than hedonist accounts

– “Pleasure is something important… but a life that contains only pleasure… might be a good enough life, but it’s somehow impoverished”

– Nihilism

– “It feels like experiences aren’t everything”… “Experiences are subject to manipulation, habituation…”

…and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.

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Thanks Graham.