99: “The right to a fair start in life” – Carter Dillard of Fair Start Movement – 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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Carter is Policy Director and Board Member of the Fair Start Movement, an organisation dedicated to giving every child a fair start in life. He is the author of Justice as a Fair Start in Life. Carter began his career as an Honors Program appointee to the U.S. Department of Justice. He later served as a legal adviser to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in the national security law division. He wrote his thesis reformulating the right to have children under Jeremy Waldron, his extensive academic work on family planning has been published by Yale, Duke, and Northwestern Universities, as well as in peer-reviewed pieces.. He has served on the Steering Committee of the Population Ethics and Policy Research Project and was a Visiting Scholar at the Uehiro Center, both at the University of Oxford. He has taught at several law schools in the U.S., served as a peer reviewer for the journal Bioethics, and most recently managed an animal protection strategic impact litigation program.

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 

01:21 Carter’s Intro

– Fair Start Movement: Shifting family planning from prioritising the desires of parents to prioritising the needs of future children

– Achieving the SDGs

– A future of 4-6 billion humans vs. 12-14 billion

– Economic growth & inequity & ecosystem factors

– The right to a fair start in life

03:54 What’s Real?

– Naturalistically based civil rights

– Rejecting the flawed “science” used to justify discrimination

– Truth & justice

– “Scientific justifications for the denigrations of non-humans also fell apart under scrutiny”

– Reading Peter Singer. Applying civil rights lessons to animal rights

– Exploring the human population issue

– Suffering, flourishing & relative autonomy

– Climate/environment limitations on autonomy & flourishing

– “Science had become god” & a naturalistic family

– “What we’ve learned about non-human cognition really should embarrass decades & decades of human living as completely unethical”

– “It’s our children, grandchildren &great-grandchildren that will suffer the most because we’ve failed to respect the non-human world”

– Nagel’s “View from nowhere”… “we all mutually agree to avoid that pain… that doesn’t require supernatural grounding”

– Systemic failures in law & early education

14:25 What Matters?

– Naturalistic ethics

– Social contract ethics

– “Would you consent to that?”

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

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join our “I’m a Sentientist” wall via this simple form.

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Thanks Graham.