Sentientism "That system will be history... Our job is just to speed that up" - Thom Norman of FarmKind.giving - Sentientism 215
Thom Norman is the co-founder of FarmKind, a new non-profit focused on raising money for some of the best farmed animal charities. FarmKind is designed to help donors both have a big impact for animals and donate to the organisations they care about most. It allows users to split donations between an expert-recommended super-effective charity and their favourite charity, then provides a bonus on both.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and "how can we make a better world?"
Sentientism answers those questions with "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips!
00:56 Welcome
02:30 Thom's Intro
- Co-founding @farmkind
- "What's the thing I can do best... to tackle the issue of factory farming?"... "We believe the single biggest thing... is to donate to the right charities... we help people to do that"
- Finding charities that do great work and making donating to those charities super-easy
03:44 What's Real?
- A very, very religious family "church is an integral part... of their worldview... also social structures"
- "Broadly a positive thing"
- Anglican, Church of England Christian
- Asking philosophical questions that "hit up against some bible verse or god - and that's the end of the conversation"
- Conversations with some Christians about animals: "Humans are made in the image of god... we are above other animals... that is kind of the end of the conversation"
- "As someone who increasingly... took the suffering of animals very seriously... I don't think that's where the conversation should end... and for many Christians that's not where it ends"
- "You can think that humans matter more than animals and still think that animals do matter"
- "We can still agree on basic things like 'suffering is bad'... 'animals suffer'... 'if there are things we can do to prevent suffering'... 'then it seems obvious that that's a good thing'"
- The people working within religious communities to emphasise more universal sentiocentric compassion... #ahimsa, #stewardship, care and compassion, mercy
- Reading religious apologetics and secular points of view
- "I don't know what I think... a pragmatic pragmatism?... what version of the world do I see that allows me to operate... to move through it... even if epistemically or ethically that's not 100% perfectly logically sound"
- Humility... "We need to be clear that we're not sure that we're right"
- Donating to the most effective charities "is not the only thing people care about"... so FarmKind allows donation splitting... head and heart donations
- The tension between different values... more rational and more intuitive / personal
- "It's very important we don't disregard those emotional reasons"
15:03 What Matters?
26:00 Who Matters?
38:24 A Better World?
01:08:37 Follow Thom and FarmKind
- Farmkind.giving (sign up to the newsletter!)
And more... full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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