Sentientism "If you combine rationality and compassion you have the essence" - Jonathan Leighton of OPIS - Sentientism 185
Jonathan is an ethics strategist, writer, social change advocate and public speaker. He is Executive Director of the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS), a Swiss-based think-and-do tank that promotes the prevention of human and non-human suffering as our overriding global ethical priority. His book, The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe, explores the question "What matters?". His new book The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering goes further in proposing a rigorous reassessment of how we think about ethics.
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 Clips!
01:00 Welcome
03:34 Jon's Intro
- Molecular biology PhD
- Ethicist
- Writing "The Battle for Compassion" and "The Tango of Ethics"
- Running the "think and do tank" OPIS (Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering) "Trying to put the ideas into practice"
04:41 What's Real?
- A scientific family, physicist father
- "A naturalistic, mechanistic way of thinking about the world"
- "It's not that there was no #spirituality at all... a #Jewish household that was more traditional than religious... Reciting things that I didn't necessarily understand the meaning of"
- "...a brief phase where I did take things [religious prescriptions] more literally... but that didn't last very long"
- "Seeing the world as inherently physical"
- "Not to say that the subjective doesn't matter... the subjective is the essence of what matters"
- Maternal grandfather "I remember him describing himself as a Humanist... his way of saying 'don't take the supernatural too seriously'"
- "I think spirituality is an important part of life... but I don't think of spirituality in the supernatural sense... I think of spirituality in terms of the experience... a feeling that there is an intense meaning possible in life."
- "During spiritual experiences we might suspend the very rational perspective. You can't really be fully plunged into a spiritual experience if you're also trying to analyse things scientifically at the same time."
- In circles with people, lighting a fire, reciting poetry... "it feels like a source of meaning at times to get into that other state of mind."
- "It's this dance between two very different perspectives"
- "How do we reconcile the need to understand reality as accurately as possible using the tools of rationality and science and how do we also extract meaning from our existence?"
- JW: Instead of a scientistic denial or a mystical reification of the subjective... a recognition that our subjective experiences are part of the objective world we all share... and are the source of its value
- Subjective experience is determined by the physical "but you won't actually know what it's like... without having experienced it yourself"
13:25 What Matters?
- "Subjective experience... it's the most important part of reality... the only part of reality that really matters when it comes down to ethics..."
46:40 Who Matters?
01:03:37 How To Make A Better World?
01:19:43 Follow Jon and OPIS
- https://www.jonathanleighton.org/
- https://www.preventsuffering.org/
...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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