8: "My enemy, which I will destroy, is arbitrariness!" - Sentientist Conversations - Stijn Bruers

In these Sentientist Conversations, we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Stijn is a physicist (phd), economist (phd in progress), animal activist, rational moral philosopher (another phd) and an Effective Altruist! He co-founded and is president of EA Belgium. He’s currently researching economics at the university of Leuven.

We talk about:

• Academic activism
• God not saving Stijn from swimming classes
• Martial arts, Star Wars & eastern/Buddhist philosophy (chi, forces, accupuncture, telekinesis, telepathy)
• Retaining a sense of awe, wonder & connection within a naturalistic worldview
• Ecocentrism/biocentrism as intuitively attractive, but as Stijn’s biggest moral mistake
• Ecosystems can’t suffer & “Gaia doesn’t care”
• The risk that ecocentrism often really reflects a human aesthetic judgement, not genuine altruistic concern for other sentients
• The moral salience of wild animal suffering
• The “don’t play god” rule against intervening in nature is a reflection of human values, not altruistic concern
• Are the most important moral questions actually the simplest?
• The value of thought experiments in solid morality - treating ethics like physics
• In ethics as in physics, we shouldn’t arbitrarily make exceptions
• Nihilism & its association with a materialist worldview
• Outgrowing a “puberty” stage in personal philosophy
• Moral uncertainty
• Life project of finding fundamental moral principles. Starting with 8, then 5, now 3: 1) Universal application / categorical imperative; 2) Avoiding unwanted arbitrariness (e.g. discrimination, exceptions, revelation); 3) Relative preferences (~utility / well-being / preferences)
• Religious believers are atheists in every other religion
• Starting from rights & working back to derive sentience as the moral qualifier (makes no sense to apply rights (e.g. autonomy / being used as a means) to non-sentients as they have no interests or needs to protect)
• We can grant rights to everything, but they can only be breached for sentient beings!
• Sentience/flourishing/suffering as the full range of simple & rich qualitative experiences, not just basic hedonistic pains & pleasures
• How every other interest or preference (e.g. freedom/autonomy) can be assessed through their impact on the quality of sentient experience
• ... Find the full show notes here.

You can learn about Stijn’s work here: stijnbruers.wordpress.com & he's on Twitter here @StijnBruers.

Stijn is on our “Sentientist wall” – why not join him there in helping to normalise compassionate, rational thinking?

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 groups. Our main group is here on FaceBook.