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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Emilia is co-author of the book Think Like A Vegan and host of the Think Like a Vegan podcast. She is involved in the Birchfield Highlands re-wilding project in Scotland, edits the quarterly magazine for The Heath & Hampstead Society in London and has developed life skills and ethics workshops for underserved youth. Professionally, she has been a corporate finance lawyer for over 20 years.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”
Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips!
01:25 Welcome
– Shared Sentientism guests with @thinklikeavegan :
04:41 Emilia’s Intro
– Corporate finance, vegan writing / podcasting, rewilding
in Scotland, magazine editing
05:45 What’s Real?
– Growing up in Italy
– #catholic school “which I hated… it never made sense to me that only some people… would go to heaven”
– Letting teachers know at 5-6 years old “this doesn’t
make any sense”… “they kind of stopped asking me questions”
– Dad is an Indian philosophy professor
– Investigating eastern and western traditions and religions
“I said ‘none of it matters’… it matters what I do here and now”
– “People have their traditions and I love that…but
for me ultimately I don’t need to have any of that”
– “The fundamental of all of them is love… just practice it”
– “That love then turns in to a respect and a valuing… of sentient life… and everything that’s around us”
– “Plants & funghi… even minerals and mountains… they may not feel anything but that doesn’t matter… it’s all
connected”
– “The fate of the least among us… is extremely important”
– “Bees and insects… how they go, we go”
– “I don’t need an outside force to tell me to do the right thing”
– “A certain basic fairness… treat everyone the same unless there’s a morally relevant reason to treat them differently”
– “I have personally witnessed things that I cannot explain… there’s lots of things I don’t know… so I’ve decided that’s fine”
– “You have to leave space for changing your mind… we
learn everything!”
– JW: How broken epistemology can lead “good” people to do terrible things
– The ethical and epistemological errors that justify animal
agriculture
– Maneesha Deckha’s “beingness” concept
– “We as advocates have to be better at our own rhetoric”
– “We live in a capitalist, non-vegan world… so there
will be inherent things that you are not going to be able to solve”
– “You don’t need to be well versed in philosophy… we
can all get there”
– Examining what’s driving our actions… fear (of others,
change, deistic reprisal, social norms, admitting we were wrong)
– JW: Uncommon common sense re: ethical and epistemic basics
– Humans building convenient hierarchies “as long as
you’re at the top”
– “Animal agribusiness has never been nice… 10,000
years ago… 5,000 years ago… there’s always objectification, exploitation and death… that doesn’t change”
– “To the being – you only have one life”
26:20 What Matters?
53:13 Who Matters?
01:00:42 A Better World?
01:22:00 Follow Emilia
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join our ”I’m a Sentientist” wall via this simple form.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on FaceBook. Come join us there!
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