Sentientism

Zion Lights is an author & activist known for her environmental work & science communication. She is UK director of Environmental Progress. She has been a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion (XR) UK on TV and radio, and founded & edited XR’s Hourglass newspaper. She has written for The Huffington Post, authored the evidence-based nonfiction book The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting, and given a TEDx talk. To watch instead of listen, here's our conversation on YouTube. We talk about: Front line activism (before & during XR) Why environmentalists should commit to evidence & reason, even when it’s uncomfortable (e.g. nuclear) The risks of cause commitment leading to dogma & the ignoring/warping of evidence How a lack of evidence risks undermining movement credibility (particularly when being interviewed by Andrew Neill) Individual change vs. systemic change – making it easier for people to do the right thing How XR have helped bring env. concerns into the public consciousness Energy Justice, finding sustainable ways to get energy to people that most need it Understanding the reality of life in less-developed countries & acting with compassion as we pursue solutions Avoiding the developed country trope of: “We burned fossil fuels to get rich & happy – but you developing countries can’t, because we’ve destroyed the environment” Embedding compassion (for human & non-sentient beings) in our environmentalism Growing up in England with Punjabi parents, one Christian & one Sikh Exploring religions but being “baffled” by them How other dogmas (e.g. anti-vaxx, anti-masking) relate to religious dogmas The good (compassion) & bad (e.g. caste discrimination) of religious ethics Fatalism, karma & crossing the road in Indian cities! Fatalism & prayer as ways of coping with a difficult life, but ones that trap people Avoiding romanticism about living “simple” lives. These lives are often short, risky & full of suffering Superstitions as another set of un-founded & potentially dangerous beliefs The sense of freedom from letting go of superstition & religion & adopting a scientific worldview Marrying a doctor for safety/health as well as status reasons! Risking family & social connections to take a different path The value & constraints/dangers of community obligations The importance of freedom & autonomy The image of animal products as high status, aspirational or a “treat”,  going back to hunter/gatherer times Veganism, animal farming, clean meat, wild animal suffering, eco-fascism, paganism  A Star Trek/Kaku/Deutschian/Sagan future! There’s more about Zion here: http://www.zionlights.co.uk/ & you can follow her on Twitter here @ziontree. Here she is on our Celebrity “wall”. Sentientism is “Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings.” You can find out more at sentientism.info. Everyone interested, Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our community. Our main group is here on FaceBook.

In this Sentientist Conversation I talk to Law and Rights Lecturer and Author, Dr. Joe Wills. We talk about what’s real and what matters morally. “We have a golden opportunity to re-imagine our relationships with non-human animals.” We discuss: – Religious indoctrination and influences in childhood – Morality without the supernatural – The dangers of having too narrow a moral circle (within and beyond humanity) – Extending our moral circle (and avoiding moral doughnuts!) – Social norms that hold us back from extending our moral circle – Narrow (pain + pleasure) and richer conceptions of sentience – Sentiocentrism vs. biocentrism vs. ecocentrism – The dangers of dogma (including scientistic dogmas!) – The important contributions of religious compassion and religious thinkers to animal ethics thinking – How even compassionate supernatural belief systems can lead otherwise good people to do serious wrong – How dogma blocks constructive conversation – Criticisms of Humanism and Sentientism as over-confident, universal, “western” ways of thinking vs. their deep, cross-cultural, pre-religious (even pre-human!) roots – Religion and aristotelian hierarchy as an engine of oppression within and beyond humanity – Sentientism as a bulwark against oppression – Insisting on moral consideration for every being capable of suffering – The dangers of moral relativism – Welfarism, abolitionism, extinctionism, segregationism, antinatalism, relationalism and the future of human and non-human animal relations – The ethics of farming human toddlers (let’s not) – Wild animal suffering and what (if anything) we should do about it – If sentient experiences are all that matter, should we plug into Nozick’s experience machine? – Are we already in a simulation? Does it matter if the simulation is good enough? – We have a golden opportunity to re-imagine our relationships with non-human animals given climate change/zoonosis/anti-microbial resistance crises, but will we take it? – Seeing companion animals as family members, not property – Legal opportunities to link climate change to resisting animal farming – Political initiatives (e.g. Sentience Politics in Switzerland) working to end factory farming and resist animal oppression – How can we tap into the latent public opinion against factory farming and even animal slaughter (See Sentience Institute research). You can find out more about Joe’s academic work here and can follow him on Twitter here @DrJoeWills. Sentientism is “Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings.” You can find out more about it at Sentientism.info. Everyone interested, whether Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our global community. Our biggest group is here on Facebook. Many thanks to Graham Bessellieu for his post-production work on this video. Go follow him (and maybe work with him!) at @cgbessellieu.

Hi, Welcome to our new podcast. This is just a quick trailer. You can look forward to conversations with celebrities, activists, academics and interested lay people about "what's real?" and "what matters?". While Sentientism is a very simple, common sense, philosophy, it has some deeply radical implications! A commitment to evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings might seem obvious, but almost everyone on the planet disagrees with it, for now... To find out more about Sentientism, visit sentientism.info or our new YouTube channel. You're also very welcome to join any of our online, global communities, whether you think you might be a Sentientist or you just find the idea interesting. Our biggest so far is here on Facebook where we have people from every generally habitable continent and around 90 countries. Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe and even give us a review (now I'm starting to feel like a real podcaster 🙂).