If you prefer audio, here are the links to the Sentientism podcast: 🍎apple.co/391khQO 👂pod.link/1540408008. Ratings, reviews & sharing with friends all appreciated. You're helping normalise "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings" sentientism.info. Everyone is welcome in our online communities - come join us: sentientism.info/groups or our biggest here on FB: facebook.com/groups/sentientism.
@1:03:35 As a former smoker .. i can say very definitively that I did not like smoking.. it's part of being addicted and not knowing how the heck to stop, having tried everything.. until finally, you come across great info/facts buried under rubbish info helping figure it out and untangle from hellish living.
My first thought after the intro: You gotta learn to stand before you can walk or run. You gotta be a sentientist before you can become a biocentrist or ecocentrist. - No short cuts. No fooling yourself. - Right now we are just crawling in the muck, not even close to standing yet... Anyway, I look forward to hearing from this philosopher.
Loved this. Particularly loved hearing about a whole new worldview being described, having deconstructed out of a religious paradigm through to atheism very recently while realising that the morality you’re describing is precisely what I’ve always held to but lacked the community to share it with. I have to say that while I’m very much a pragmatist in the way that I approach life and I did wonder if this conversation was in danger of disappearing up its own backside about 2/3 way through, I was very impressed with the way you were able and willing to articulate your abstract ideas in terms that the layman could still follow and I was very grateful for this.
Hi Mark - thanks for watching, for your comment and for the kind words. Very glad the Sentientism worldview seems to resonate with you. Many people, like you, already think this way so it doesn't necessarily change their thinking much - but it's nice to have a term and a community. On the latter we run a range of friendly online groups - open to anyone interested, sentientist or not. You'd be very welcome in any or all of them: sentientism.info/groups. Also thanks re: the "disappearing up its own backside" comment :). Pretend philosophers like me face that risk all the time but hope we generally manage to bring it back to reality. In my experience the most important philosophical answers are the simplest. Always good to come back to those e.g. "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings" :)
Fair point. To be honest after 210 episodes and about 300 hours of conversation you could sum the whole lot up in 10 seconds with "believe using evidence and reason and show practical compassion for all sentient beings such that you won't needlessly cause their exploitation, harm or death." If only this simple message would sink in so quickly and easily :)
1:33:31 But that world won't magically happen until we put clear and definitive lines down in the proverbial sand and advocate for Veganism to everyone within reach of our advocacy. The not pushing for Veganism is the equivalent of arguing that only those who want to go vegan should go vegan. 🤬 Half way through this discussion I was so hopeful that Mr MacClennan was going to say all the right things. 😔
@@Sentientism I don't like that idea, but in some categories, old-guy-ocean-swimming for example, I'll take it. If being unique (or absurd) is elite, I'll take it - but uniqueness (and absurdity) is everywhere... So much for that...
6:40 - Justice from a Rawlsian point of view. I like that! Rawls applied beyond humans is a great thing... Also, Joel's background seems a bit absurd and diverse, so maybe he'll agree that diversurdity is what's real. 😁 Not only what's real, it's also the universal purpose as far as I can see...
Got to the one hour mark.. and have to take a break as I kept getting the same thought .. too many words for something so simple.. needless confinement/enslavement, mutilation, killing of sentient beings who don't wish to die should be off the table. full stop. edit: will come back later to finish listening as I'm curious to know where he stands as someone who works with animal ethics. I feel like I will not like the ending and have this sneaking suspicion that there is some definition discordance/manipulation.
Thanks for watching. I suspect you'll share my frustration later in the conversation... As I explain, for me (and for the Sentientism worldview) the concepts of moral consideration / care / compassion lose any meaning if they don't at least translate into a non-maleficence obligation (basically not needlessly exploiting / harming / killing). That obligation implies exactly what you say - that these things should be off the table (outside of genuine survival / extreme situations). Despite our earlier insistence on philosophy driving implications not the other way around, the later part of the conversation feels like it keeps getting drawn back into social / systemic / practical / tactical concerns that end up diluting the ethical clarity we really need to hold onto. Just as we do with intra-human justice causes. We might argue that incremental approaches are the best way to end modern enslavement - but we all agree it needs to be ended. Ditto with non-human animal exploitation.
@@Sentientism Thanks for what you do.. I must say that i don't have much patience as time goes on. I've been vegan for close to 3 decades and I made it work cause it wasn't about me but the animal victims. These overly worded folk are harder on my patience as they play with words .. lots and lots of words. I try to simplify everything and thus there's quite the clash between the wordy intellectuals wanting me to go down their dark tunnel of justifying needless slaughter, like some crazed carnist Olympian going for gold, and myself.
@@ellev11 The most important basics of philosophy are so simple. Often when we find ourselves adding complexity that's because we can't bear to face up to the implications. Even the wordy people can change though...
@@Sentientism Yes i remain mostly an optimist =) Like a plant growing through a tiny crack in cement.. planting V seeds and letting it do its thing among the incessant heavy foolish words.. and hopefully allowing the realigning of behavior with their ethics to bloom soon enough.
I think the biggest issue I have with this line of philosophy is that it still depends on what is effectively a fairly arbitrary and, more importantly, binary qualification of a phenomenon that is still very poorly understood and quantified. It's all well and good to say that a Human is clearly sapient, but a Plant isn't, but what about the entire spectrum of life between those two extremes? After all, we know from research that plants are capable of experiencing and communicating distress, among other things; and things get even weirder once we allow fungal networks into the calculation, and how much we're learning we just don't know about that aspect of nature. Ongoing research is showing us that sapience is something that simply cannot be defined in the narrow way it seems to be here, that many forms of life experience a degree of sapience that is different from ours not only in complexity, but also in kind. How do we account for our limited ability to even recognize sentience when it takes a dramatically different form than what we are already familiar with? I'm also not entirely comfortable with the way that human-exceptionalism is taken up (it seems to me fairly glibly as well) when it proves useful for supporting the philosophy, and discarded when it is counterproductive. Are only humans truly capable of acting as moral agents? How do we truly differ from other animal, other predators, other omnivores? I'd say we obviously do differ in some fundamental way, but is that truly a difference of kind or of degree? Here, of course, we get into the problem of sentience vs sapience, but I don't see any clear indication of that factoring into any of this discussion; certainly not what it may imply about humans and our relation to the rest of nature. All that aside, I do fully agree on the problem of capitalist industrial farming -- not only livestock, but the entire structure of farming -- and that is clearly the most important point of focus before deciding whether we should be allowed to eat meat at all (speaking as someone who spent 20 years as a vegetarian for multiple reasons). Farming as it exists in a capitalist society has gone far beyond mere nutrition, far beyond the amount of food needed to sustain the entire world population; as evidenced by the mountains of waste it persistently generates. Simply eliminating the capitalist incentives would go miles toward reducing our overall impact on the environment.
Thanks for watching and for your thoughtful comment. I don't think sapience is morally salient. Only sentience is. Then - I get that we can't be 100% sure of the sentience of any being - but we can't be 100% sure of anything outside of formal systems like maths so we'll just have to get used to it :) Fuzzy concepts like life and health are still useful - so I don't see why sentience can't be too. All concepts are fuzzy so again - we're just going to have to get used to it. I also don't see why a moral system must be grounded in a perfectly defined, binary concept - that feeling seems to be a hangover of a more religious mode of morality? I know our minds are desperate for clarity and binaries - but reality just doesn't seem to work that way. I don't think sentience takes a dramatically different form than what we're already familiar with. Arguably sentience is the think we've been most directly familiar with for longest. My guess is it's just another fascinating class of computation. One I see as morally salient because it renders the entity running that computation morally vulnerable for good or ill. As for moral agency I don't see that as morally salient either when it comes to setting our moral scope. When it comes to animal farming - outside of genuine survival or sustenance needs - it's simply not consistent with having even minimal moral consideration for the sentient beings that are its victims. That's true whether the farming is driven by a capitalist economic system or any other. As you say, conveniently, plant-based agricultural systems are radically better not just ethically - but for our shared environment / climate and even for human health (zoonosis, AMR...).
@@Sentientism That sounds like an awful lot of hand-waving and special-pleading to me. As though you're willing to accept the benefits of human exceptionalism when it serves your philosophical position (eg. exclusive moral agency), while conveniently dismissing the various concomitant problems inherent to it. As for your comment, "I don't think sentience takes a dramatically different form than what we're already familiar with," I would suggest making yourself more familiar with recent research before engaging in such a blanket dismissal. Plant-based agriculture is not necessarily _entirely_ morally superior, either, when it's the same exploitative and environmentally-destructive, monoculture-based factory-farming practices involved, as is currently the case for the overwhelming majority of commercial farming. The push for reducing the use of animal-base products has resulted in a lot of "unforseen" impact, such as the destruction of massive amounts of primary rainforest, converted to oil palm plantations; and the baffling acceptance of petrochemical-based substitute products. True veganism is, itself, inherently a lifestyle of privilege; yet has become such a moral cudgel for a significant part of western leftism and its unfortunately love of purity tests (a fact which the video itself touches on, if in a fairly cursory manner). Ultimately, as much as I would tend to agree with many of the philosophical points made, and I do believe that compassion is crucial to our well-being as a species and in our interactions with the world around us; I find the moral argument for pure veganism to be, at best, unconvincing. As a possibly wise man once said, we may perhaps be more than animals, but we are certainly not less than animals.
I reject human exceptionalism partly because I don't see moral agency as relevant to qualifying as a moral patient. Also because I don't think only humans should be considered "moral agents" in that sense. I'm not even sure the concept is really that useful (sentientism.info/sentientism-in-action/sentientist-justice in case of interest). As for different forms of sentience I'm very open minded - as long as we take a naturalistic approach (provisional, probabilistic) to working those out. Plant based ag is not morally perfect but it is radically morally superior to animal agriculture - partly because of the ~10-20x feed conversion ratios involved. Whatever the harms of plant agriculture they are multiplied many times by animal agriculture in addition to it's own direct exploitation, suffering and killing. You have the land-use / deforestation thing backwards. Because of the feed conversion ratios above {90-95% input wasteage) animal agriculture and feed crop growth is brutally land-hungry. Switching to plant ag would free up a couple of continents worth of land: ourworldindata.org/land-use. Veganism is not a lifestyle of privilege. The least privileged communities through history and today are much closer to veganism than industrialised western consumers are today. It's worth exploring ancient concepts like ahimsa and ital - so many examples. It's more appropriate to call industrial animal agriculture a lifestyle of privilege - and by definition - one of oppression. Anecdotally I fear many of the privileged people saying "veganism is a lifestyle of privilege" are using their romanticised / exoticised perception of indigenous cultures as a justification for their own very "western" consumption decisions. Thank you for your closing comment - and for sharing a broad (even universal?) compassion. For me, veganism is simply a direct implication of that compassion in that it sees the needless exploitation, harming or killing of any sentient being as a moral wrong and commits us to doing what we reasonably can to avoid causing more of it. I don't see how we can have compassion for a being while needlessly exploiting / harming / killing them. How can these commitments come apart? I'm not claiming that veganism is perfect - even vegans cause some harm - but doesn't compassion by definition include a condemnation of the exploitation/harm/killing of those we have compassion for? That is the essence of veganism.
I get the feeling that if Gia means anything, it might not be very anthropocentric and we’d better get with her program because she’s just about to make a dramatic readjustment to rebalance things in favour of the holistic wellbeing of the planet and without reference to the long term involvement of humanity on earth.
Ha - indeed. I don't think Gaia cares about anything either way. It is totally indifferent. Gaia would be just as "content" (i.e. this concept doesn't apply to the entity of Gaia at all :) ) if its ecosystem operated like Venus as if it was able to continue to support sentient life. Arguably a genuinely holistic ethic might feel the same. If life and sentience really are morally irrelevant - than any set of systems is as good as any other. To judge one over the other would be anthropocentric :). Of course, most ecocentrists do value sentience too so there's hope there! While many others are just straightforwardly anthropocentric. For them, ecocentrism is more about a comfortable living space for humans, "nature" that's pretty to look at, ecosystem services humans need and plenty of animal "resources" for humans to exploit.
Too bad intrinsic, extrinsic or instrumental value are hardly considered. Economic value is considered most. The last tuna will be the most valuable by far - for eating! Maybe that is a sort of instrumental value but really it's just exploitative value. I know economics is not ethics, but if we use our misothery (our true ethics) to justify our economic behavior - it is.
39:17 - True, too many cats outside is a problem. Same as too many humans outside (or inside, or anywhere). 😁 Too many humans = too many cats. True? Which is the bigger problem? TNR for cats is a solution. I won't venture a guess as to a solution for humans... (Well, I could but the comment would likely disappear...)
People need to start with the fundamental basics. First, they must want to be a good person, to treat others with respect and to be opposed to disrespecting others for selfish reasons. They must want to do the right thing, and not what is popular. Just saying, majority doesn't make right, and I think that this gets mixed up, so to speak, very often. Selfishness, disrespectful of others, is rampant. 1:32:13 One might ask themselves why we think murder is bad. Human death, is it bad? Death is a different subject than the infliction of death upon another. It is the singular aspect of a consciousness (an experiencer, so to speak) that causes an animal to matter. "Minimally sentient" sounds like it may be a figment of the imagination, who's to say that one is more or less sentient, but then again, that doesn't matter in terms of who matters, the individuality of consciousness is why individuals matter, it's about respect. Maybe He's means to speak of simpler animals. Even the avoidance of pain is in order to preserve the life, the animal wants to live, "self and future", here, seem to be all wrapped up into one, so to speak, consciousness. 1:44:07 It starts with the desire to do what's right with concern for the other.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I think Joel is echoing what Peter Singer sometimes says (see my interview of him) - that if a "simpler" sentient being doesn't have a concept of their own life-course, their future plans/potential, their future relationships, their death... then killing them without their suffering (e.g. via anaesthesia?) would in itself not be an immoral act (ignoring any 2nd order impacts on their group/relations or even on the human doing the killing...) My first point is that this thought experiment has nothing whatsoever to do with animal agriculture because there is no animal agriculture without constraint / exploitation / suffering regardless of the slaughter method. Sadly this thought experiement line of thinking is used by many to justify/assuage guilt at continuing to support real-world animal agriculture. People buy from every-day farms and slaughterhouses while reassuring themselves by imagining some sort of compassionate end-of-life palliative euthanasia that might be done by a sanctuary. My more direct point is that even "simpler" sentient beings still have a fundamental "interest" in continuing to live - even if they couldn't fully conceptualise or express that interest. If, using Singer's own guidelines, we should consider like interests similarly and avoid speciesism, that would render even a suffering-free death a moral wrong. This is why, fortunately, the "humane" farming of human infants is widely considered immoral regardless of whether these infants are allowed a "net positive life" and regardless of whether they suffer when slaughtered. If that logic plays through even under Singer's version of utilitarianism then it's only reinforced by pluralistically leaving some space for rights / care / relational / virtue views of ethics.
Does "sentient" have a definition? If so, isn't that where you should begin? I'd like a definition and objective test for sentient. I fact, before taking you seriously, I'd absolutely need to see that. PS: Also: what about harmful sentient beings. The lion, which will kill me, in an objective existential threat.
Hi Mark. Sentience is defined as the capacity to have experiences - particularly valenced ones (~suffering being bad experiences, flourishing being good ones). We have a rich and ever improving range of objective tests for sentience (see our Sentientism sub-reddit for loads of links) - using lines of inference from behaviour, communications, computational architecture (e.g. nervous systems), evolutionary contexts - as well as just looking into the eyes of a puppy, a baby, a chicken or a pig :). These approaches can only give us provisional, probabilistic credences. Just as with finding a perfect delimitation of "life" or "health" or any other concept. That's all we'll ever get outside of formally defined systems. As for the lion - Sentientism insists on moral consideration for all sentient beings but that doesn't mean constraining, harming or even killing a sentient being can't ever be justified. Personally - if a lion or a human was trying to hurt or kill me or my family I'd defend myself and them using violence if that was the best available response. Our compassion for potential victims can often justify harming those threatening harm.
We possibly do have a moral obligation towards other animals. But would you consider it specieist to argue that we are infinitely more worthy of moral consideration compared to the other animals? The other animals does not have the ability to explain, understand and control the world in the infinite ways we do, and thus, human beings are infinitely more special compared to other animals. We are not enslaved by our psychological environment the way the animals are, since our critical, explanatory creativity breaks free from biological evolution's programming. In that sense, we do have an obligation to make animals more morally free than what their own programming realises they should have for themselves.
For me the evidence doesn't show that sort of clear distinction. Many non-human animals have powerful capabilities we do not. Many humans (infants, for example) have less capability than other sentients that might exclude them from your "human" classification. We might also see our critical, explanatory creativity as another aspect of biological evolution's programming rather than something radically distinct from it. Either way, I wouldn't grant the human species infinitely more moral worth than non-human sentients. We are all sentient - and that is all that is required for meaningful moral consideration.
Thanks Eric. Do you have an example in mind of where this would have helped in particular? Sentientism itself is very pluralistic but personally I'm quite drawn to pragmatist approaches.
@@Sentientism The message of pragmatism is that we don't need "ontology" at all - its just gibberish. We employ "methodological naturalism" because we find value in doing so, but we can content ourselves with with this efficacy that we perceive in our actions, without insisting that our methodological naturalism must become "ontological" in any sense. (see 17:30 to 17:30 and your response for how this confusion tends to play out and recognized as "question begging" - as soon as we "experience" something, then that thing is subject to the question, "is it really natural, or something else, and if something else, then how would we know that?"). Your title, "Good ethics does start with what's real...with what's true" is another classic example of this question-begging nature of "ontological" speculation. Any declaration of "what is real" can be followed by an inquiry of "how do you know?" Which is why several millennia of asking ourselves "what is real?" hasn't led to any useful insights - we still don't know, nor is there any indication we ever will. And yet, this isn't a problem. Our confusion is thinking of human interaction as consisting of you "agreeing with reality" and then with me "agreeing with reality," and our ability to proceed depends on both of us first "agreeing with reality." But we can just as well describe this situation as "agreeing with each other," regardless of what is "really real." If you find "sentientism" compelling, then by all means advocate for it. But we don't "sentience" to be "real" in order to also find it valuable and compelled to treat it as something special, which is why insisting upon what is "real" just seems like so much more useless "ontology."
@@ericb9804 Thanks - v.helpful. I share some of that concern re: obsessing over ontology. My main responses to those problems are: 1) to focus on provisional, probabilistic credences rather than insisting on perfectly binary beliefs / knowledge / truths and 2) to focus on epistemology (using "evidence and reason") much more than ontology. Personally my naturalistic epistemology has led me to have a very high credence in a naturalistic ontology - but there's little point getting too hung up on the latter. My main concern with taking pragmatism too far (e.g. "whatever happens to be useful for my in group to believe") is if it edges towards allowing relativism, arbitrary beliefs, fideism, dogmatism, revelation, unquestionable authority etc. Those are the things a naturalistic epistemology rejects, regardless of any ontology. Partly because these ways of "knowing" are very unlikely to help us understand reality well - but also because beliefs grounded in these ways can often be used to justify harming others and / or excluding valid moral patients from our moral consideration.
@@Sentientism Ok, but I think your concerns over pragmatism are ill founded. You seem to me to be expressing fear of a boogey-man more so than offering critique. "My main concern with taking pragmatism too far...is if it edges towards...arbitrary beliefs, fideism, dogmatism, revelation, unquestionable authority etc." - Ok, but aren't all those things that already happen now? Can't one be smitten by "dogmatism" or "unquestionable authority" regardless of their epistemology? So it seems your complaint with pragmatism is just that its the only epistemology that acknowledges that yes, people are capable of doing all these things, and often to what appears to be their own detriment. And yet, I don't have any particular reply to them other than saying I disagree with them, and insisting they are "wrong" in some silly "ontological" sense doesn't seem to change the situation, so its unclear why I should do it. People have the beliefs they do because they find them compelling; because they find some "utility" in them. But that is not to say that you have to find the same utility in any given belief as someone else or that you even have to understand what any given person means when they say this is happening to them. Being pragmatist doesn't mean you have to agree with someone who says they believe something you don't. In fact, you can even fight them over it, if you wish. So I don't see how your concerns amount to anything more than a complaint that other people are capable of doing things that you disagree with, and you sure do wish there was some way to convince them to come around to your way of thinking, which is why you invoke this notion of "ontology," which is way for you to pretend that you have access to some "truth" that they don't and they are "wrong" to oppose you. But it seems to me we will be better served by acknowledging that yes, people can and do occasionally talk themselves in to some weird beliefs. Be that as it may, we have no choice but to appeal TO those people, on their own terms, not TO some hypothesized 'reality" that I know but they don't. Such behavior of appealing to some metaphysical "truth" is exactly what led us to our current epistemological dilemma, which is why doing more of it won't help. Being pragmatist is just to say that no one gets to claim possession of "ultimate truth" and as surprising as it is to us steeped in metaphysics, this realization changes nothing. "Relativism is what people call pragmatism who don't like it." - Richard Rorty
As you say, and as I stated clearly, I'm not attacking the core of pragmatism - but cautioning about where some might take it. I know this is UA-cam comments but we don't need to fight :) Sentientism is pretty pluralistic but personally I'm quite drawn to pragmatic arguments. I disagree that naturalistic epistemology is compatible with dogmatic beliefs. By definition a naturalistic epistemology involves changing our credences as the evidence and our reasoning change. That's the opposite of dogmatic. So someone who claims a naturalistic epistemology cannot then hold to a belief where there is good quality countervailing evidence. Whereas someone who takes pragmatism too far might simply say "this dogma is useful to me and my ingroup" regardless of the evidence. So while I acknowledge we probably can't ever achieve "ultimate truth" about "reality" or ontology I have a very high degree of credence that there is a reality actually out there - and that the evidence we gain about reality tells us things about it. Engaging honestly with reality (through our limited senses, cognition, tools and collaboration) seems likely the best way of understanding it well - always provisionally and probabilisticially. My sympathy with pragmatism comes from the view that understanding reality well is generally "useful" - particularly if we want to make that reality better for all sentient beings. I also agree with pragmatism's view that no one has privileged access to "perfect truth". My fear is simply that some find it "pragmatic" to adopt dogmas that benefit them or their in-group and harm out-group members. If these dogmas are useful enough to them - they may well reject any evidence and any argument. I agree that this just is descriptively how many groups of humans work. We can descriptively call that "pragmatic" if we like but I wouldn't want to imply this approach is normatively valid. It's just yet another self-serving and often harmful dogmatism. It would be better for pragmatism to disavow that sort of approach completely and concentrate instead on how useful it generally is to understand reality through a naturalistic epistemology - always with humility - provisionally and probabilistically.
If you prefer audio, here are the links to the Sentientism podcast: 🍎apple.co/391khQO 👂pod.link/1540408008. Ratings, reviews & sharing with friends all appreciated. You're helping normalise "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings" sentientism.info. Everyone is welcome in our online communities - come join us: sentientism.info/groups or our biggest here on FB: facebook.com/groups/sentientism.
@1:03:35 As a former smoker .. i can say very definitively that I did not like smoking.. it's part of being addicted and not knowing how the heck to stop, having tried everything.. until finally, you come across great info/facts buried under rubbish info helping figure it out and untangle from hellish living.
👋 Jamie. I'm multitasking while listening intently.
Thus far, this is shaping up to be my favorite episode on your channel.
My first thought after the intro: You gotta learn to stand before you can walk or run. You gotta be a sentientist before you can become a biocentrist or ecocentrist. - No short cuts. No fooling yourself. - Right now we are just crawling in the muck, not even close to standing yet... Anyway, I look forward to hearing from this philosopher.
1:15:40
Excellently explained distinction
Yep - that was a really useful distinction I hadn't heard before. Something can have intrinsic value but only if there's a sentient being to value it!
Loved this. Particularly loved hearing about a whole new worldview being described, having deconstructed out of a religious paradigm through to atheism very recently while realising that the morality you’re describing is precisely what I’ve always held to but lacked the community to share it with.
I have to say that while I’m very much a pragmatist in the way that I approach life and I did wonder if this conversation was in danger of disappearing up its own backside about 2/3 way through, I was very impressed with the way you were able and willing to articulate your abstract ideas in terms that the layman could still follow and I was very grateful for this.
Hi Mark - thanks for watching, for your comment and for the kind words. Very glad the Sentientism worldview seems to resonate with you. Many people, like you, already think this way so it doesn't necessarily change their thinking much - but it's nice to have a term and a community. On the latter we run a range of friendly online groups - open to anyone interested, sentientist or not. You'd be very welcome in any or all of them: sentientism.info/groups.
Also thanks re: the "disappearing up its own backside" comment :). Pretend philosophers like me face that risk all the time but hope we generally manage to bring it back to reality. In my experience the most important philosophical answers are the simplest. Always good to come back to those e.g. "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings" :)
Looking forward to this discussion
49:30
Such a crucial criticism 👍 👍 👍
I did not need almost two hours to think about this, it took me less than 20 seconds. And one with my life.
Fair point. To be honest after 210 episodes and about 300 hours of conversation you could sum the whole lot up in 10 seconds with "believe using evidence and reason and show practical compassion for all sentient beings such that you won't needlessly cause their exploitation, harm or death." If only this simple message would sink in so quickly and easily :)
Opening clip is very enticing!
Thanks Louis - hope the rest of the episode lived up to the clip! (despite the frustrations...)
1:33:31
But that world won't magically happen until we put clear and definitive lines down in the proverbial sand and advocate for Veganism to everyone within reach of our advocacy.
The not pushing for Veganism is the equivalent of arguing that only those who want to go vegan should go vegan.
🤬
Half way through this discussion I was so hopeful that Mr MacClennan was going to say all the right things.
😔
1:11:21 - I believe Tom Regan was a big fan of "Informed intuition". I always liked that combination of concepts...
1:45:00 - Excellent and fundamental point ! - Aim to be in the elite in just this way. 😁
In my mind you're definitely "elite" Roy :)
@@Sentientism I don't like that idea, but in some categories, old-guy-ocean-swimming for example, I'll take it.
If being unique (or absurd) is elite, I'll take it - but uniqueness (and absurdity) is everywhere... So much for that...
6:40 - Justice from a Rawlsian point of view. I like that! Rawls applied beyond humans is a great thing...
Also, Joel's background seems a bit absurd and diverse, so maybe he'll agree that diversurdity is what's real. 😁
Not only what's real, it's also the universal purpose as far as I can see...
1:33:50
Zzzzzzzzzzzactly, Jamie!
🎤 DROP 💥
Thank you :)
1:23:10 - For sure...
Got to the one hour mark.. and have to take a break as I kept getting the same thought .. too many words for something so simple.. needless confinement/enslavement, mutilation, killing of sentient beings who don't wish to die should be off the table. full stop.
edit: will come back later to finish listening as I'm curious to know where he stands as someone who works with animal ethics. I feel like I will not like the ending and have this sneaking suspicion that there is some definition discordance/manipulation.
Thanks for watching. I suspect you'll share my frustration later in the conversation... As I explain, for me (and for the Sentientism worldview) the concepts of moral consideration / care / compassion lose any meaning if they don't at least translate into a non-maleficence obligation (basically not needlessly exploiting / harming / killing). That obligation implies exactly what you say - that these things should be off the table (outside of genuine survival / extreme situations). Despite our earlier insistence on philosophy driving implications not the other way around, the later part of the conversation feels like it keeps getting drawn back into social / systemic / practical / tactical concerns that end up diluting the ethical clarity we really need to hold onto. Just as we do with intra-human justice causes. We might argue that incremental approaches are the best way to end modern enslavement - but we all agree it needs to be ended. Ditto with non-human animal exploitation.
@@Sentientism Thanks for what you do.. I must say that i don't have much patience as time goes on. I've been vegan for close to 3 decades and I made it work cause it wasn't about me but the animal victims. These overly worded folk are harder on my patience as they play with words .. lots and lots of words. I try to simplify everything and thus there's quite the clash between the wordy intellectuals wanting me to go down their dark tunnel of justifying needless slaughter, like some crazed carnist Olympian going for gold, and myself.
@@ellev11 The most important basics of philosophy are so simple. Often when we find ourselves adding complexity that's because we can't bear to face up to the implications. Even the wordy people can change though...
@@Sentientism Yes i remain mostly an optimist =) Like a plant growing through a tiny crack in cement..
planting V seeds and letting it do its thing among the incessant heavy foolish words..
and hopefully allowing the realigning of behavior with their ethics to bloom soon enough.
👍 Whole food plant based for the environment and health; vegan for the victims!
*Ask your city government to sign the Plant Based Treaty!* 🖖
Absolutely! You might enjoy this interview with the PBT leaders too :) ua-cam.com/video/Obs1Zv1jP6w/v-deo.html. Thanks for watching, Lorah!
I think the biggest issue I have with this line of philosophy is that it still depends on what is effectively a fairly arbitrary and, more importantly, binary qualification of a phenomenon that is still very poorly understood and quantified. It's all well and good to say that a Human is clearly sapient, but a Plant isn't, but what about the entire spectrum of life between those two extremes? After all, we know from research that plants are capable of experiencing and communicating distress, among other things; and things get even weirder once we allow fungal networks into the calculation, and how much we're learning we just don't know about that aspect of nature. Ongoing research is showing us that sapience is something that simply cannot be defined in the narrow way it seems to be here, that many forms of life experience a degree of sapience that is different from ours not only in complexity, but also in kind. How do we account for our limited ability to even recognize sentience when it takes a dramatically different form than what we are already familiar with?
I'm also not entirely comfortable with the way that human-exceptionalism is taken up (it seems to me fairly glibly as well) when it proves useful for supporting the philosophy, and discarded when it is counterproductive. Are only humans truly capable of acting as moral agents? How do we truly differ from other animal, other predators, other omnivores? I'd say we obviously do differ in some fundamental way, but is that truly a difference of kind or of degree? Here, of course, we get into the problem of sentience vs sapience, but I don't see any clear indication of that factoring into any of this discussion; certainly not what it may imply about humans and our relation to the rest of nature.
All that aside, I do fully agree on the problem of capitalist industrial farming -- not only livestock, but the entire structure of farming -- and that is clearly the most important point of focus before deciding whether we should be allowed to eat meat at all (speaking as someone who spent 20 years as a vegetarian for multiple reasons). Farming as it exists in a capitalist society has gone far beyond mere nutrition, far beyond the amount of food needed to sustain the entire world population; as evidenced by the mountains of waste it persistently generates. Simply eliminating the capitalist incentives would go miles toward reducing our overall impact on the environment.
Thanks for watching and for your thoughtful comment. I don't think sapience is morally salient. Only sentience is. Then - I get that we can't be 100% sure of the sentience of any being - but we can't be 100% sure of anything outside of formal systems like maths so we'll just have to get used to it :) Fuzzy concepts like life and health are still useful - so I don't see why sentience can't be too. All concepts are fuzzy so again - we're just going to have to get used to it. I also don't see why a moral system must be grounded in a perfectly defined, binary concept - that feeling seems to be a hangover of a more religious mode of morality? I know our minds are desperate for clarity and binaries - but reality just doesn't seem to work that way.
I don't think sentience takes a dramatically different form than what we're already familiar with. Arguably sentience is the think we've been most directly familiar with for longest. My guess is it's just another fascinating class of computation. One I see as morally salient because it renders the entity running that computation morally vulnerable for good or ill.
As for moral agency I don't see that as morally salient either when it comes to setting our moral scope.
When it comes to animal farming - outside of genuine survival or sustenance needs - it's simply not consistent with having even minimal moral consideration for the sentient beings that are its victims. That's true whether the farming is driven by a capitalist economic system or any other. As you say, conveniently, plant-based agricultural systems are radically better not just ethically - but for our shared environment / climate and even for human health (zoonosis, AMR...).
@@Sentientism That sounds like an awful lot of hand-waving and special-pleading to me. As though you're willing to accept the benefits of human exceptionalism when it serves your philosophical position (eg. exclusive moral agency), while conveniently dismissing the various concomitant problems inherent to it. As for your comment, "I don't think sentience takes a dramatically different form than what we're already familiar with," I would suggest making yourself more familiar with recent research before engaging in such a blanket dismissal.
Plant-based agriculture is not necessarily _entirely_ morally superior, either, when it's the same exploitative and environmentally-destructive, monoculture-based factory-farming practices involved, as is currently the case for the overwhelming majority of commercial farming.
The push for reducing the use of animal-base products has resulted in a lot of "unforseen" impact, such as the destruction of massive amounts of primary rainforest, converted to oil palm plantations; and the baffling acceptance of petrochemical-based substitute products. True veganism is, itself, inherently a lifestyle of privilege; yet has become such a moral cudgel for a significant part of western leftism and its unfortunately love of purity tests (a fact which the video itself touches on, if in a fairly cursory manner).
Ultimately, as much as I would tend to agree with many of the philosophical points made, and I do believe that compassion is crucial to our well-being as a species and in our interactions with the world around us; I find the moral argument for pure veganism to be, at best, unconvincing. As a possibly wise man once said, we may perhaps be more than animals, but we are certainly not less than animals.
I reject human exceptionalism partly because I don't see moral agency as relevant to qualifying as a moral patient. Also because I don't think only humans should be considered "moral agents" in that sense. I'm not even sure the concept is really that useful (sentientism.info/sentientism-in-action/sentientist-justice in case of interest).
As for different forms of sentience I'm very open minded - as long as we take a naturalistic approach (provisional, probabilistic) to working those out.
Plant based ag is not morally perfect but it is radically morally superior to animal agriculture - partly because of the ~10-20x feed conversion ratios involved. Whatever the harms of plant agriculture they are multiplied many times by animal agriculture in addition to it's own direct exploitation, suffering and killing.
You have the land-use / deforestation thing backwards. Because of the feed conversion ratios above {90-95% input wasteage) animal agriculture and feed crop growth is brutally land-hungry. Switching to plant ag would free up a couple of continents worth of land: ourworldindata.org/land-use.
Veganism is not a lifestyle of privilege. The least privileged communities through history and today are much closer to veganism than industrialised western consumers are today. It's worth exploring ancient concepts like ahimsa and ital - so many examples. It's more appropriate to call industrial animal agriculture a lifestyle of privilege - and by definition - one of oppression. Anecdotally I fear many of the privileged people saying "veganism is a lifestyle of privilege" are using their romanticised / exoticised perception of indigenous cultures as a justification for their own very "western" consumption decisions.
Thank you for your closing comment - and for sharing a broad (even universal?) compassion. For me, veganism is simply a direct implication of that compassion in that it sees the needless exploitation, harming or killing of any sentient being as a moral wrong and commits us to doing what we reasonably can to avoid causing more of it. I don't see how we can have compassion for a being while needlessly exploiting / harming / killing them. How can these commitments come apart? I'm not claiming that veganism is perfect - even vegans cause some harm - but doesn't compassion by definition include a condemnation of the exploitation/harm/killing of those we have compassion for? That is the essence of veganism.
I get the feeling that if Gia means anything, it might not be very anthropocentric and we’d better get with her program because she’s just about to make a dramatic readjustment to rebalance things in favour of the holistic wellbeing of the planet and without reference to the long term involvement of humanity on earth.
Ha - indeed. I don't think Gaia cares about anything either way. It is totally indifferent. Gaia would be just as "content" (i.e. this concept doesn't apply to the entity of Gaia at all :) ) if its ecosystem operated like Venus as if it was able to continue to support sentient life. Arguably a genuinely holistic ethic might feel the same. If life and sentience really are morally irrelevant - than any set of systems is as good as any other. To judge one over the other would be anthropocentric :). Of course, most ecocentrists do value sentience too so there's hope there! While many others are just straightforwardly anthropocentric. For them, ecocentrism is more about a comfortable living space for humans, "nature" that's pretty to look at, ecosystem services humans need and plenty of animal "resources" for humans to exploit.
Too bad intrinsic, extrinsic or instrumental value are hardly considered. Economic value is considered most. The last tuna will be the most valuable by far - for eating! Maybe that is a sort of instrumental value but really it's just exploitative value. I know economics is not ethics, but if we use our misothery (our true ethics) to justify our economic behavior - it is.
39:17 - True, too many cats outside is a problem.
Same as too many humans outside (or inside, or anywhere). 😁
Too many humans = too many cats. True? Which is the bigger problem?
TNR for cats is a solution. I won't venture a guess as to a solution for humans... (Well, I could but the comment would likely disappear...)
People need to start with the fundamental basics. First, they must want to be a good person, to treat others with respect and to be opposed to disrespecting others for selfish reasons. They must want to do the right thing, and not what is popular. Just saying, majority doesn't make right, and I think that this gets mixed up, so to speak, very often. Selfishness, disrespectful of others, is rampant.
1:32:13 One might ask themselves why we think murder is bad. Human death, is it bad? Death is a different subject than the infliction of death upon another. It is the singular aspect of a consciousness (an experiencer, so to speak) that causes an animal to matter. "Minimally sentient" sounds like it may be a figment of the imagination, who's to say that one is more or less sentient, but then again, that doesn't matter in terms of who matters, the individuality of consciousness is why individuals matter, it's about respect. Maybe He's means to speak of simpler animals. Even the avoidance of pain is in order to preserve the life, the animal wants to live, "self and future", here, seem to be all wrapped up into one, so to speak, consciousness.
1:44:07 It starts with the desire to do what's right with concern for the other.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I think Joel is echoing what Peter Singer sometimes says (see my interview of him) - that if a "simpler" sentient being doesn't have a concept of their own life-course, their future plans/potential, their future relationships, their death... then killing them without their suffering (e.g. via anaesthesia?) would in itself not be an immoral act (ignoring any 2nd order impacts on their group/relations or even on the human doing the killing...)
My first point is that this thought experiment has nothing whatsoever to do with animal agriculture because there is no animal agriculture without constraint / exploitation / suffering regardless of the slaughter method. Sadly this thought experiement line of thinking is used by many to justify/assuage guilt at continuing to support real-world animal agriculture. People buy from every-day farms and slaughterhouses while reassuring themselves by imagining some sort of compassionate end-of-life palliative euthanasia that might be done by a sanctuary.
My more direct point is that even "simpler" sentient beings still have a fundamental "interest" in continuing to live - even if they couldn't fully conceptualise or express that interest. If, using Singer's own guidelines, we should consider like interests similarly and avoid speciesism, that would render even a suffering-free death a moral wrong. This is why, fortunately, the "humane" farming of human infants is widely considered immoral regardless of whether these infants are allowed a "net positive life" and regardless of whether they suffer when slaughtered. If that logic plays through even under Singer's version of utilitarianism then it's only reinforced by pluralistically leaving some space for rights / care / relational / virtue views of ethics.
Does "sentient" have a definition? If so, isn't that where you should begin? I'd like a definition and objective test for sentient. I fact, before taking you seriously, I'd absolutely need to see that.
PS: Also: what about harmful sentient beings. The lion, which will kill me, in an objective existential threat.
Hi Mark. Sentience is defined as the capacity to have experiences - particularly valenced ones (~suffering being bad experiences, flourishing being good ones).
We have a rich and ever improving range of objective tests for sentience (see our Sentientism sub-reddit for loads of links) - using lines of inference from behaviour, communications, computational architecture (e.g. nervous systems), evolutionary contexts - as well as just looking into the eyes of a puppy, a baby, a chicken or a pig :). These approaches can only give us provisional, probabilistic credences. Just as with finding a perfect delimitation of "life" or "health" or any other concept. That's all we'll ever get outside of formally defined systems.
As for the lion - Sentientism insists on moral consideration for all sentient beings but that doesn't mean constraining, harming or even killing a sentient being can't ever be justified. Personally - if a lion or a human was trying to hurt or kill me or my family I'd defend myself and them using violence if that was the best available response. Our compassion for potential victims can often justify harming those threatening harm.
We possibly do have a moral obligation towards other animals. But would you consider it specieist to argue that we are infinitely more worthy of moral consideration compared to the other animals? The other animals does not have the ability to explain, understand and control the world in the infinite ways we do, and thus, human beings are infinitely more special compared to other animals. We are not enslaved by our psychological environment the way the animals are, since our critical, explanatory creativity breaks free from biological evolution's programming. In that sense, we do have an obligation to make animals more morally free than what their own programming realises they should have for themselves.
For me the evidence doesn't show that sort of clear distinction. Many non-human animals have powerful capabilities we do not. Many humans (infants, for example) have less capability than other sentients that might exclude them from your "human" classification. We might also see our critical, explanatory creativity as another aspect of biological evolution's programming rather than something radically distinct from it. Either way, I wouldn't grant the human species infinitely more moral worth than non-human sentients. We are all sentient - and that is all that is required for meaningful moral consideration.
You both need more pragmatist vocabulary.
Thanks Eric. Do you have an example in mind of where this would have helped in particular? Sentientism itself is very pluralistic but personally I'm quite drawn to pragmatist approaches.
@@Sentientism The message of pragmatism is that we don't need "ontology" at all - its just gibberish. We employ "methodological naturalism" because we find value in doing so, but we can content ourselves with with this efficacy that we perceive in our actions, without insisting that our methodological naturalism must become "ontological" in any sense. (see 17:30 to 17:30 and your response for how this confusion tends to play out and recognized as "question begging" - as soon as we "experience" something, then that thing is subject to the question, "is it really natural, or something else, and if something else, then how would we know that?").
Your title, "Good ethics does start with what's real...with what's true" is another classic example of this question-begging nature of "ontological" speculation. Any declaration of "what is real" can be followed by an inquiry of "how do you know?" Which is why several millennia of asking ourselves "what is real?" hasn't led to any useful insights - we still don't know, nor is there any indication we ever will.
And yet, this isn't a problem. Our confusion is thinking of human interaction as consisting of you "agreeing with reality" and then with me "agreeing with reality," and our ability to proceed depends on both of us first "agreeing with reality." But we can just as well describe this situation as "agreeing with each other," regardless of what is "really real."
If you find "sentientism" compelling, then by all means advocate for it. But we don't "sentience" to be "real" in order to also find it valuable and compelled to treat it as something special, which is why insisting upon what is "real" just seems like so much more useless "ontology."
@@ericb9804 Thanks - v.helpful. I share some of that concern re: obsessing over ontology. My main responses to those problems are: 1) to focus on provisional, probabilistic credences rather than insisting on perfectly binary beliefs / knowledge / truths and 2) to focus on epistemology (using "evidence and reason") much more than ontology. Personally my naturalistic epistemology has led me to have a very high credence in a naturalistic ontology - but there's little point getting too hung up on the latter.
My main concern with taking pragmatism too far (e.g. "whatever happens to be useful for my in group to believe") is if it edges towards allowing relativism, arbitrary beliefs, fideism, dogmatism, revelation, unquestionable authority etc. Those are the things a naturalistic epistemology rejects, regardless of any ontology. Partly because these ways of "knowing" are very unlikely to help us understand reality well - but also because beliefs grounded in these ways can often be used to justify harming others and / or excluding valid moral patients from our moral consideration.
@@Sentientism Ok, but I think your concerns over pragmatism are ill founded. You seem to me to be expressing fear of a boogey-man more so than offering critique.
"My main concern with taking pragmatism too far...is if it edges towards...arbitrary beliefs, fideism, dogmatism, revelation, unquestionable authority etc." - Ok, but aren't all those things that already happen now? Can't one be smitten by "dogmatism" or "unquestionable authority" regardless of their epistemology? So it seems your complaint with pragmatism is just that its the only epistemology that acknowledges that yes, people are capable of doing all these things, and often to what appears to be their own detriment. And yet, I don't have any particular reply to them other than saying I disagree with them, and insisting they are "wrong" in some silly "ontological" sense doesn't seem to change the situation, so its unclear why I should do it.
People have the beliefs they do because they find them compelling; because they find some "utility" in them. But that is not to say that you have to find the same utility in any given belief as someone else or that you even have to understand what any given person means when they say this is happening to them. Being pragmatist doesn't mean you have to agree with someone who says they believe something you don't. In fact, you can even fight them over it, if you wish.
So I don't see how your concerns amount to anything more than a complaint that other people are capable of doing things that you disagree with, and you sure do wish there was some way to convince them to come around to your way of thinking, which is why you invoke this notion of "ontology," which is way for you to pretend that you have access to some "truth" that they don't and they are "wrong" to oppose you.
But it seems to me we will be better served by acknowledging that yes, people can and do occasionally talk themselves in to some weird beliefs. Be that as it may, we have no choice but to appeal TO those people, on their own terms, not TO some hypothesized 'reality" that I know but they don't. Such behavior of appealing to some metaphysical "truth" is exactly what led us to our current epistemological dilemma, which is why doing more of it won't help. Being pragmatist is just to say that no one gets to claim possession of "ultimate truth" and as surprising as it is to us steeped in metaphysics, this realization changes nothing.
"Relativism is what people call pragmatism who don't like it." - Richard Rorty
As you say, and as I stated clearly, I'm not attacking the core of pragmatism - but cautioning about where some might take it. I know this is UA-cam comments but we don't need to fight :) Sentientism is pretty pluralistic but personally I'm quite drawn to pragmatic arguments.
I disagree that naturalistic epistemology is compatible with dogmatic beliefs. By definition a naturalistic epistemology involves changing our credences as the evidence and our reasoning change. That's the opposite of dogmatic. So someone who claims a naturalistic epistemology cannot then hold to a belief where there is good quality countervailing evidence. Whereas someone who takes pragmatism too far might simply say "this dogma is useful to me and my ingroup" regardless of the evidence.
So while I acknowledge we probably can't ever achieve "ultimate truth" about "reality" or ontology I have a very high degree of credence that there is a reality actually out there - and that the evidence we gain about reality tells us things about it. Engaging honestly with reality (through our limited senses, cognition, tools and collaboration) seems likely the best way of understanding it well - always provisionally and probabilisticially. My sympathy with pragmatism comes from the view that understanding reality well is generally "useful" - particularly if we want to make that reality better for all sentient beings. I also agree with pragmatism's view that no one has privileged access to "perfect truth".
My fear is simply that some find it "pragmatic" to adopt dogmas that benefit them or their in-group and harm out-group members. If these dogmas are useful enough to them - they may well reject any evidence and any argument. I agree that this just is descriptively how many groups of humans work. We can descriptively call that "pragmatic" if we like but I wouldn't want to imply this approach is normatively valid. It's just yet another self-serving and often harmful dogmatism. It would be better for pragmatism to disavow that sort of approach completely and concentrate instead on how useful it generally is to understand reality through a naturalistic epistemology - always with humility - provisionally and probabilistically.