“Good ethics does start with what’s real… with what’s true” – Philosopher Joel MacClellan – Sentientism 208

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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Joel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans. After completing his B.A. in philosophy at the University of Akron, he was a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Panama working in environmental education and sustainable development. He completed his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Tennessee. Joel was a scholar-in-residence at Wesleyan University in 2013 as the New York University Animal Studies Initiative’s Animal Ethics and Public Policy Fellow. He held visiting assistant professorships at Washington State University and Binghamton University, SUNY, before coming to Loyola. His main areas of research are applied ethics, especially environmental ethics, and the philosophy of science. One of his many academic publications is “Minding Nature: A Defense of a Sentiocentric Approach to Environmental Ethics”.

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!

00:50 Welcome

– Joel’s PhD thesis re: #sentiocentrism

– Our Sentientism FaceBook group where Joel is a member

02:47 Joel’s Intro

– Asst Prof of philosophy at Loyola

– Director-elect of the environment programme

– Coaching the Ethics Bowl

– Institutional Review Board and animal usage ethicist

– Peace Corps volunteering in Panama

– Analytic philosophy focus

– Applied, environmental, animal ethics

– Philosophy of science and biology

– British #empiricists

– Grew up as a “latch-key kid” in Akron countryside “being in and messing around with nature” & rescuing animals (“Boy” turned out to be a girl…)

– Mother a nurse “seeing… the fragility of life very early on”

– Dad sold musical instruments “grew up around music
and art”

– “All manner of outdoor adventuring… rock climbing,
kayaking”

– “I’m a pretty hard-core board gamer… Evolution… Wingspan… nature themed board-games”

– “Within philosophy applied ethics can be a bit of a perjorative… not real philosophy”

– “I’m still trying to delay answering the question ‘what do I want to be when I grow up?'”

11:02 What’s Real?

– Raised in a minimally #protestant #Christian family “church on Sundays and that was about it”

– Mum was “more spiritual than religious”. Church for the singing and community more than belief

– Dad: “We go to church because that’s what we’re supposed to do”

– An inauthenticity about it “going through the motions”

– “I’ve never been religious or spiritual”

– “I think we’re all born atheistic at least in the sense that we don’t have any active beliefs in anything supernatural… we start as empiricists…”

– Being puzzled as a kid at realising most humans are
religious “I thought I might have been broken!”

– Sunday school after church at 10 yrs old hearing about
Noah’s ark “there’s so many species of beetle – this doesn’t make any sense at all… basic critical thinking”

32:53 What Matters?

51:50 Who Matters?

01:22:19 A Better World?

… and much more (full show notes at ⁠sentientism.info⁠)

Follow Joel

– Joel at Loyola

– Joel on LinkedIn

– Joel at PhilPeople

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