Sentientism 62: "Animal farming will end by the end of this century" - Jacy Reese Anthis - Sentientist Conversation
Jacy (https://twitter.com/jacyanthis & https://jacyanthis.com/) is a social scientist & co-founder of the Sentience Institute (https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/). His acclaimed book, The End of Animal Farming (https://jacyanthis.com/book), analyzes the development & popularisation of food technologies such as plant-based & cultivated meat.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
0:00 Welcome
1:26 Jacy's Intro
Utilitarianism, Effective Altruism, Buddhism, neuroscience, community building, Animal Charity Evaluators, Sentience Institute, The End of Animal Farming, Sociology PhD & moral expansion.
3:22 What's Real?
- Growing up around Baptist & Catholic churches near Houston but in an agnostic family
- Attending church "lockins"
- "I wasn't even told Santa was real growing up"
- Interested in Buddhist views of suffering, but not the supernatural aspects
- Naturalism has a connotation that there is nothing supernatural. "That's an empirical claim about which I remain uncertain"
- Would multiverses, our universe being a simulation or pre-Big Bang history be seen as "supernatural"?
- The varieties of religious identity: metaphysics, ethics, community
9:20 What Matters?
- Moral heuristics & their conflicts
- Adopting utilitarianism at 12 yrs old & looking for a "proof"
- From moral realism to anti-realism (per Brian Tomasik)
- It's up to us to decide which mental phenomenon to put in the "sentience" and "consciousness" categories
- Objectivity, relativism, nihilism & arbitrariness
- Even most religious people would act morally if there was no god
- Rejecting "mind-independent" truth as the next step up from rejecting supernatural truths
- Non-objective morality can still be compelling
- Grounding morality in a concern for the experiences of others
- The priority balance between reducing suffering vs. enhancing flourishing
18:20 Moral Scope & Expansion
- Utilitarianism led to vegetarianism then veganism
- Focusing initially on human issues, working at GiveWell
- Cause prioritisation led back to non-human issues
- Persuading sentiocentrists to be more effective & effective altruists to be sentiocentric
- The bias against helping other species
- Non-human animal causes can seem sentimental until you engage w/the arguments
- Far future/long-termism
- Effective Altruists have the highest veg*n % of almost any human group
- Ancient roots of sentiocentrism/veganism & naturalism
- "Everything has been said before"
... And much more - see Sentientism.info for full show notes.
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Thanks Graham for the post-prod https://twitter.com/cgbessellieu.