Sentientism 176: "Your Robot Dog Will Die" Author Arin Greenwood - Sentientism
Arin Greenwood describes herself as an animal writer, novelist and lawyer. Her young adult book "Your Robot Dog Will Die" was published in 2018. Arin was animal welfare editor for The Huffington Post and now writes about dogs, cats, and other animals for The Today Show, The Dodo, The Washington Post, Slate, Creative Loafing, the American Bar Association Journal and many other publications.
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.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
02:01 Arin's Intro
- Dog lover, animal writer, former lawyer who has "written a couple of books"
- Writing about animal welfare then working with animal advocacy and sanctuary organisations
- Austin Pets Alive https://www.austinpetsalive.org/
03:57 What's Real?
- Growing up in a #Jewish family "And I'm still Jewish"
- Secular Judaism "We identify as Jewish, we have a Jewish community, I had a Bat Mitzvah... we celebrate a lot of the Jewish holidays but it doesn't necessarily have a belief component to it"
- Parents "go in and out of how spiritual they feel at any given moment"
- "I don't feel like I know enough about the universe to say there's definitely no such thing as a higher power... I barely know what's happening inside my own house most days"
- "My instinct is as a secular jew"
- "There are people who know more than I do... I believe in expertise... I also believe in humility"
07:53 What Matters?
- Regardless of whether there is a universal being... we do have knowable duties... to those who can feel happiness and those who can suffer"
- "The hard part is figuring out what those duties are and how they exist in a practical sense"
- "What difference does it make... if there's some sort of universal being... you should act in a good way regardless"
- The #torah story of Abraham and Isaac "where god does tell Abraham to kill his son... that's not a story about 'you must be good' that's a story of 'you must follow my instructions'" #Divinecommandtheory
- JW: "We can have a hope that god might be benevolent... but if they're not we still have to do what we're told"
- Naturalistic #epistemology and/or #ontology
- "In Judaism we don't have hell... it's mostly 'you'll just really disappoint your mother'"
- Morality, amorality and immorality
- Moral foundations, #moralrealism or #antirealism
- #Psychopath and #Sociopathy JW: "even they can find an intellectual path to not harming others"
- JW: "Almost everybody has something you can start with... cares about their mother or their children or their friends... starting with the values they already hold... working with that... consistency"
21:20 Who Matters?
- "I've been #vegetarian since I was six years old... I made the connection between the animals I enjoyed spending time with and what was on my plate... at that point it just became unthinkable to keep eating them."
- "My husband... who doesn't share that same moral impulse... what do the normies think?"
- The animal welfare world: "Even in that world there's a lot of inconsistency - animal shelter events will serve meat... director eats meat
01:15:20 Follow Arin
...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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