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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Vicky is Managing Director of The Humane League UK . She trained as a vet and worked in the animal agriculture industry before leaving to focus on campaigning for non-human animals.
In these Sentientist Conversations, we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Full show notes and links here.
This conversation is also available here on our Sentientism YouTube Channel. Why not subscribe there too?
We discuss:
– Feeling an early affinity with animals, volunteering at animal sanctuaries at 10 years old, always wanting to be a vet
– Training as a vet, seeing the reality of animal farming & feeling helpless. How vets are caught up in the machinery of the industry
– How broken animal agriculture is & how much suffering is caused
– Leaving to advocate for animals, with CIFW then Humane League UK
– Driving institutional change. Working with companies to reduce the animal suffering they cause at scale
– The relief of meeting others that take sentience & suffering seriously
– Questioning then leaving Christianity as a teenager & the death of a close family member as a turning point
– Finding comfort in naturalism. “We have our time & then it passes”
– Naturalistic wonder, awe, meaning & a sense of connection, enhanced through a silent meditation retreat (vs. “spirituality”)
– Suffering/flourishing of others as the foundation of morality
– Meditation as a practice of focusing on our own sentient experience and feeling gratitude
– Relativism & supernatural ethics are arbitrary vs. grounding ethics in a naturalistic understanding of sentience
– Going vegetarian (despite challenges from parents re: nutrition)
– The shock of watching an artificial insemination unit operate
– Fighting cognitive dissonance on the way to going vegan + how much it helps to have others around you to help ease the transition
– Visiting Ghana as an eye opener re: global development & the history of colonialism
– Considering the ethical impacts of our personal consumption
– Cognitive dissonance as a way of protecting ourselves given the scale of suffering. Avoiding burn-out
– The Diving Bell & the Butterfly
– Taking the perspective of others, rather than just imposing your own assumptions
– Wild-animal suffering & flourishing. Nature programmes as “snuff movies”
– Categorising an animal as “farmed” or “wild” doesn’t reduce the animals’ experience of its own suffering
– Red vs. grey squirrels
– Not knowing how to help doesn’t warrant excluding beings from our moral circle
– Culling as the default for human intervention in the wild
– Ending animal farming as an obvious win-win-win
– Important problems are often the easiest (e.g. end animal farming)
– Animal farming change is happening fast now (e.g. ending cages) & consumer consciousness is shifting
– Veganism getting less “weird”, approaching a tipping point?
– Concern for species is mostly about human interests
– Economic & social drivers slowing change
– “Lesser developed countries” leap-frogging past the mistakes made by “more developed countries” on both climate & animal agriculture, because of more compassionate values and more radical innovation
– While you’re participating in something, it’s hard to think clearly about its ethics
– Freeing our latent morality!
– A more socialist future?
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