7: From Devout Sunday School Teacher to Atheist, Vegan, Sentientist Academic and Author – Sentientist Conversations – John Adenitire

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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John shares his story, from being a devout Pentecostalist Sunday School Teacher in Nigeria to being a Sentientist, atheist, vegan academic and author. Video version here.

John is Strategic Lecturer in the School of Law and a Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. He is a cellist and dancer.

We discuss:

• John growing up in Nigeria, then Italy in an evangelical, pentecostal family (both parents are missionaries and reverends) and community
• Being a sunday school teacher and devout believer
• Challenging those beliefs as a teenager, both re: evidence and ethics (e.g. rejecting religious homophobia)
• The rich integration of Nigerian culture, racial identity and religion and how that made leaving religion behind a difficult struggle
• Finding the courage to be open with parents who are very deeply involved with the church
• How some religious communities accept non-believing, “cultural” community members while others reject those who drop their supernatural beliefs
• Veganism being seen as a rejection of a culture rather than an individual moral choice
• How having freedom, time and distance from our culture can help us assess and improve our worldview
• Value as the foundation of ethics, not religion. Value comes first
• A pluralistic conception of value from the perspective of each individual: community, family, friendship, relationships, experiences
• Sentience as a sufficient ground for considering a being valuable because they have a perspective. Things can go better or worse for them. Morality is caring about that perspective of others
• Whether non-sentient beings have intrinsic or just instrumental value
• Is beauty of value even if no sentient ever experiences it? Let’s not destroy the Mona Lisa just to be safe
• The danger of bio/eco centrism and environmentalism neglecting or even harming sentient beings while trying to protect non-sentient things
• The full richness of sentient experience. Not just pleasure and pain – but aethetics, awe, wonder, connectedness and love
• The importance of setting a philosophical baseline of moral consideration for all sentients. But how even that baseline is the product of deep philosophical thinking by intellectual giants (e.g. Bentham)
• Why most of the 8 billion people on the planet disagree with Sentientism
• The importance of ensuring that our confidence in naturalism doesn’t lead to our own dogma or closed-mindedness or arrogance
• The importance of humility and receptiveness and open-mindedness and constructive conversation
• Compassion even for people you disagree with
• Basing our ethics on a naturalistic understanding of sentience and sentient beings
• How to get to a Sentientist future. Facts and logic won’t be enough… our emotional reactions come first, philosophy follows
• Empathy as a way to engage people emotionally
• Helping people be more ready change by setting a good, “normal” example
• Making better ethics the easier choice
• Once people have taken easier, better ethical choices they might upgrade their ethics
• Freedom of belief, but not freedom to use those beliefs to harm
• When you see something as more important than suffering and death, you tend to get quite a lot of suffering and death
• Law is there to restrict freedom to protect others
• We already grant rights to corporations and rivers, why not extend them to non-human animals?
• How the law and rights fields can help drive positive change.

 John at QMUL. @JohnAdenitire. sentientism.info. FBook.