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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Thom Norman is the co-founder of FarmKind, a new non-profit focused on raising money for some of the best farmed animal charities. FarmKind is designed to help donors both have a big impact for animals and donate to the organisations they care about most. It allows users to split donations between an expert-recommended super-effective charity and their favourite charity, then provides a bonus on both.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better world?”
Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips!
00:56 Welcome
02:30 Thom’s Intro
– Co-founding @farmkind
– “What’s the thing I can do best… to tackle the
issue of factory farming?”… “We believe the single biggest thing… is to donate to the right charities… we help people to do that”
– Finding charities that do great work and making donating to those charities super-easy
03:44 What’s Real?
– A very, very religious family “church is an integral part… of their worldview… also social structures”
– “Broadly a positive thing”
– Anglican, Church of England Christian
– Asking philosophical questions that “hit up against some bible verse or god – and that’s the end of the conversation”
– Conversations with some Christians about animals:
“Humans are made in the image of god… we are above other animals… that is kind of the end of the conversation”
– “As someone who increasingly… took the suffering of
animals very seriously… I don’t think that’s where the conversation should end… and for many Christians that’s not where it ends”
– “You can think that humans matter more than animals
and still think that animals do matter”
– “We can still agree on basic things like ‘suffering
is bad’… ‘animals suffer’… ‘if there are things we can do to prevent suffering’… ‘then it seems obvious that that’s a good thing'”
– The people working within religious communities to
emphasise more universal sentiocentric compassion… #ahimsa, #stewardship, care and compassion, mercy
– Reading religious apologetics and secular points of view
– “I don’t know what I think… a pragmatic pragmatism?… what version of the world do I see that allows me to operate… to move through it… even if epistemically or ethically that’s not 100% perfectly logically sound”
– Humility… “We need to be clear that we’re not sure that we’re right”
– Donating to the most effective charities “is not the only thing people care about”… so FarmKind allows donation splitting… head and heart donations
– The tension between different values… more rational and
more intuitive / personal
– “It’s very important we don’t disregard those emotional reasons”
15:03 What Matters?
26:00 Who Matters?
38:24 A Better World?
01:08:37 Follow Thom and FarmKind
– Farmkind.giving (sign up to the newsletter!)
And more… full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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