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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Jack Waverley is a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Manchester. He uses marketing and consumer research to protect and promote the interests of all animals, including humans. Jack teaches on a range of BSc and MSc courses in the Fashion, Business, and Technology (FBT) group. He also supervises a number of PhD and dissertation students. He is an academic expert member of the Academy of Marketing and a member of the Vegan Society’s Research Advisory Committee.
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
00:52 Welcome
– Jack’s talk at VARC 2025
– “The VARC conference is like being in the future…where we want to get to… it really does feel like you’ve jumped forward 10 years”
02:49 Jack’s Intro
– A marketing consumer researcher… focusing both onconsumption of animals and consumption for animals
– “Markets as a system of morals… material objects moving around… infrastructures”
– “How we move from one system to another”
– The AI question “I very much adopt a sentiocentric or Sentientist perspective”
– “The reason I’m concerned about animals is because they are sentient”
– “If AI were to become sentient… then of course they would fall within… my moral circle”
– “Most people think about ‘what can AI do for me… for humans?… How does AI affect humanity?'”
– “I’m much more interested in ‘what can we do for AI?’… our responsibilities for AI… how can AI help post-humanity, more than humanity, all sentient beings.”
– “I’ve ended up in this… very anthropocentric tradition… marketing and consumer research… but bringing in animals and bringing in AI”
– A new field of #SentientistMarketing ?
05:14 What’s Real
– Growing up in “a nominally Christian household… but we never went to church… more agnostic”
– “There was never an explicit framework of… this is why these things are good or bad”
– A liberal, progressive upbringing “live and let live”
– “It wasn’t quite a blank slate [re: moral thinking] but it was as close as you probably get”
– “Broadly naturalistic is my baseline… interested in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics… scientific ways of approaching the world”
– “I didn’t really go out looking for any kind of revelation… [or] any strict rules… [or] some sort of authority figure”
– “I didn’t mind other people having religion but for me it just didn’t make sense… I was naturalistic”
31:44 What and Who Matters?
35:50 A Better World?
01:21:40 Follow Jack:
– Jack at Manchester University
– Jack on LinkedIn (please get in touch)
And more… full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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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