21: "How can I have been morally asleep for so long?" - Prof Randall Abate - Sentientist Conversation

Randall is an author and environmental, animal, climate and constitutional law professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey. His books include “What Can Animal Law Learn From Environmental Law?” and “Climate Change and the Voiceless: Protecting Future Generations, Wildlife, and Natural Resources”.

In these Sentientist Conversations (subscribe!), we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”. Sentientism is “evidence, commitment & compassion for all sentient beings.”

Full show notes here: https://sentientism.info/how-can-i-have-been-morally-asleep-for-so-long-prof-randall-abate-new-sentientist-conversation

Watch the video here. 

We discuss:

• Academic silos between animal/environmental/constitutional law and between law, philosophy and advocacy
• The disconnect between environmental and animal ethics and law
• Growing up in a Catholic household, more social than spiritual
• Appreciating religion as a topic of study, not as something to practice
• Exploring Eastern religions and spirituality
• Feeling deeply spiritual without religion
• Compassion as a theme in many religions
• Remaining open-minded about religious ideas
• Agnosticism and atheism
• Awe, wonder and connectedness within a naturalistic worldview and their commonality with supernatural/spiritual emotions
• Freedom of belief, but not freedom to use supernatural beliefs to harm others
• Compassion for all living things & respect for nature, but not realising the link to animal product consumption (even as an environmental law professor) until teaching animal law “How can I have been morally asleep for so long?”
• The brain-washing of animal product consumption: health, normality
• Not knowing any v*gans
• The difficult social process of giving up animal products
• How much easier going v*gan is now
• Is the ethical argument re: animal farming over?
• Anthropocentrism & human supremacy
• Biocentrism & ecocentrism. Does Sentientism go far enough?
• Instrumental vs. intrinsic value
• Christian dominion & stewardship
• And more... (see here)

You can find Randall here at Monmouth.

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Thanks to Graham Bessellieu for his post-prod work on this video. Follow him at @cgbessellieu.