72: “Making Compassion Easier” – Tobias Leenaert – Author and meta-advocate – Sentientist Conversation

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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Tobias (@TobiasLeenaert) is an author & a vegan advocacy consultant. He blogs at Veganstrategist.org & wrote “How to Create a Vegan World”. He is the co-founder of ProVeg International. He is an Effective Altruist – thinking about the best ways to achieve a compassionate society. He also describes himself as a “Slow opinionist”.

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:

0:00 Welcome

1:28 Tobias’ Intro – A life of vegan advocacy

– Setting up EVA, then “meta-activism” helping other activists be more effective

2:37 What’s Real?

– Being confirmed as a Catholic & attending Catholic school because “that’s just what you do”

– Defending rational & scientific worldviews

– “I’m not the most devout atheist you can find”… there’s a possibility there’s “something more”

– Could religious visions one day be made real through technology? Reincarnation, heaven, creation/simulation?

– “Maybe religious ideas are perversions of what is technologically possible”

– Science fiction

– Hallucinogenics & “religious” experiences

– The hard problem of consciousness vs. “it’s just what doing this sort of info processing feels like”

– The echoes of religious ideas even for those who no longer believe. The Exorcist” movie

15:34 What Matters Morally?

– Being raised as an ethical person. Volunteering at 12 yrs old

– A teenage phase of being less morally engaged, then “it came back – especially with animals”

– “That empathy was there always – without needing a system of rules”

– Emotional & rational bases for compassionate ethics

– “You can be a vegan sociopath”… decide rationally to act compassionately without feeling empathy

22:12 Extending moral consideration to non-humans

– Loving companion cats and dogs at home as a child

– Wondering what’s the difference between them & cows we eat

– “If I can’t answer that question I have to stop eating animals”

– Taking 10 years to go vegan even after that realisation

– The power of taste preference… overcoming intertia

– Making a bet to go without meat for a month. Then carrying on

– Empathy, reasoning, then practice

– “Making compassion easier”

– Peter Singer’s shallow pond thought experiment

– Anthropocentrism, sentiocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism

– Wild animal suffering & artificial sentients

– “I don’t see the point in going beyond sentientism – only sentient beings can suffer by definition”

– The dangers of environmentalists granting moral consideration to species or populations that have no concerns & can’t experience

… and much more. Full notes at Sentientism.info and on YouTube.

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

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Thanks Graham https://twitter.com/cgbessellieu.