"We need to imagine a different world" - Emilia Leese
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- Опубліковано 3 лип 2024
- 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 audio is on our Podcast: apple.co/391khQO & open.spotify.com/show/3c9OG5M....
00:00 Clips!
01:25 Welcome
- Shared Sentientism guests with @thinklikeavegan :
- Troy Vettese episode: • Half-Earth Socialism -...
- Josh Milburn episode: • "Animal activists don'...
- Aysha Akhtar episode: • "Ending animal testing...
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?
- JW: Are nihilism, relativism and divine command theory more "amoralities" than moralities?
- "You have to realise there is an other"
- Doing talks at a Himalayan vegan festival in Nepal
- "You have to be able to move forward... the facts on the ground now" (as opposed to just doing what we've always done)
- Ethics that focus on moral agents (virtue, care) vs. moral patients (suffering, freedom)
- "For me a right is something that is inherent - you have that by virtue of being alive and being a sentient being... beingness"
- "You have to have the interests... a subject of a life... you exist"
- JW "They [your perspective/interests] matters to you... and a right is... just saying... they should matter to everyone else too?"
- Gender, sex etc... "aren't morally relevant"
- "There's a variety of different rights... but the fundamental right of being free from exploitation number one... if you don't have that you can't get any of the other ones"
- "Being free... to exist unfettered in the most basic way... that's the fundamental. Everything else builds on top of that... [e.g.] the right to vote..."
53:13 Who Matters?
01:00:42 A Better World?
01:22:00 Follow Emilia
- emisgoodeating.com/
- open.spotify.com/episode/78C2...
- x.com/emisgoodeating
- birchfieldhighlands.org/
& much more... (sentientism.info for full notes) #sentientism
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Looking forward to this discussion
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@@TheWorldTeacher
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Finished - Well done. I like and agree (maybe I like because I agree).
Interesting that I got an ad within the first minute....... I hope YT gives you at least a small check at the end of the month!
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A very small check - thank you for putting up with the ad :)
She is talking so much sense and for me a key word is in the title "We have to IMAGINE a different world". Imagining a cruelty free world is the first step to arriving there. I live in a part of the world where it is considered normal and respectable to torture big game fish. I get to walk on the local wharf and see these magnificent marine beings being hung upside down on the scales to be weighed and photographed. The murderers stand around and look proud. My partner has to literally drag me away before I start screaming grief and hatred at them. I spend many days out on the water in my flimsy kayak, where these beings live and I regard them as my friends. I am in their world, out where they are superior to me in so many ways. I spend my time imagining how all this cruelty might one day end and I write about it in stories which are fictional, because they weave my imaginings into the real marine setting of these real marine beings.
I'd like to express my gratitude to Emilia for speaking on behalf of all non-human beings.
Well said. I know what you mean.
The truth.
Starting... I hope "Think like a Vegan" is as popular as "Walk like an Egyptian". 😁
Looks like I might have another podcast to get into... 👏
Btw. Wayne Hsiung's podcast is back - and now on UA-cam - ua-cam.com/video/Quv6hmq-qNA/v-deo.html
Wow... just wow. I absolutely loved listening to Emilia. I don't think there was a thing she said that I didn't agree with; and there were things she said that I was routing for, at the screen, as I listened ☺; chief among them: that we have to imagine a different way of existing outside of Capitalism. I really appreciated her candid reflections on the fact that the natural world just 'is'... something many humans don't seem to want to come to terms with (chief among them transhumanists). It was sobering hearing her discuss the fact that it's going to take time for humans to change, and that even though we are on the precipice, and we may not make it, there isn't much we can do about that. Her reflections on the fact that non-human animals are just 'things', within human cultures globally, and her descriptions therein, were absolutely on-target (again, more emphatic 'Yes's!' from me at the screen). Brilliant conversation. Thank you both!
Thanks Erika - it was great talking to Emi! We could have gone for hours...
9:38
Love doesn't necessarily turn into respect. Love is an emotion, respect is a principle (coupled with a commensurate action or behavior).
Yes, compartmentalism is a problem, and forms of exploitation can be, and should be, addressed together - but I also have a sense that what humans do to themselves - in the name of capitalism, religion, military honor, hierarchies of all kinds, etc. - is categorically different to what they/we do to innocent others.
It may derive from the same nasty root, but it is less bad (more stupid) if applied to one's own kind - worse (more evil) if applied to innocent others.
Also, I do agree with Emilia that changing human nature will take a long time - but the consequences of our human nature could change things very fast. Think AI, climate change, a worse pandemic, nuclear war... Many ways to a rude awakening (or a rude death) caused by our "human nature".
25:26 - exactly. This reminds me of Jim Mason's excellent point about "misothery" - ua-cam.com/video/1_nrrOM8nU0/v-deo.html .
It was not "nice" when we began parasitising herd animals, and we've become increasingly less "nice" since then - not to mention the huge scale increase of our "nastiness" based on population increase alone. - And yes, the nastiness, the harm, is done to the individual, each individual - not herd, not tribe, not nation, not even species.
I'd say capitalism, socialism, authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, etc. - ALL are unsustainable given our population numbers (and, of course, our exploitative nature).
30:40 - the root of morality? Sentientism.
- But point well taken that autonomy is a major part of it.
Yep. Personally I care about autonomy because sentient beings care about their autonomy so we should care about their autonomy too. They like having it and they don't like having it taken away. Others care about autonomy / freedom as an independent foundational good.
@@Sentientism Agree, but I think the degree to which sentient beings desire/need autonomy varies greatly. Some individuals are loners by nature and probably need autonomy greatly for wellbeing. Others are more "ant-like" and can thrive with less. The latest Wayne Hsiung vid talks about how we take every bit of autonomy away from pigs - ua-cam.com/video/g80m1-fH4ps/v-deo.html . But no matter how important autonomy is - it's not for us to deprive others of theirs!
@@rwess Yep. My suggestion is that we should care about the autonomy of others as much as they care about it themselves - and balanced against the other things they might care about. There's a risk that if we overwhelmingly value autonomy for a being that actually cares more about not suffering... then we might abandon them to a horrible fate because we don't want to constrain their autonomy in any way. They wouldn't want that. As with our own infants and even with other adults - sometimes constraints on autonomy can be justified to protect the individual or to protect others from the individual.
20:48
Sounds very woo woo....... I wish you would have pressed her to explain precisely what she's referring to
We do come back to it later. I don't think it's particularly "woo" - in a way beingness feels like another way of talking about sentience. Maneesha is coming on as a guest soon so we can explore this fully!
I listened to this entire conversation very carefully, and found zero 'woo' in it. As-a-matter-a-fact, she spoke more truth than anyone I've ever heard on these talks.
@efortunywhitton
Everyone sees thing's differently....... different strokes for different folks.
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26:00
Sounds like a whole lot of woo woo
Like KARMA?
@@TheWorldTeacher
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22:21
Sounds very woo woo - why is she equating imperfect with Capitalism?? Very bizarre
I don't think Emi equates imperfection with capitalism. But she does see both capitalism and non-veganism as imperfections in our world. We touch on this later on - she sees capitalism and the pursuit of shareholder value as inherently exploitative.
@Sentientism
That may be true but she clearly appeared to equate the two at around that timestamp. To be accurate, she did say Capitalist non-Vegan world as her correction to "imperfect world". So, she clearly appeared to be conflating "imperfect world" with "Capitalist non-Vegan"...... which is just weird.
@@LouisGedo Yep. Emi sees both as serious imperfections.
@@Sentientism
That's fine if she does and I wouldn't necessarily disagree....... but she should have worded it very differently than to say "or as I like to call it" which clearly implies she's conflating the two......which is very problematic reasoning if that's what she actually thinks.