“Good ethics does start with what’s real… with what’s true”
“Good ethics does start with what’s real… with what’s true”
Philosopher Joel MacClellan of Loyola University New Orleans on Sentientism Ep:208 on podcast and YouTube
Find our Sentientism Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism podcast here. Here’s a clip:
Joel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans. After completing his B.A. in philosophy at the University of Akron, he was a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Panama working in environmental education and sustainable development. He completed his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Tennessee. Joel was a scholar-in-residence at Wesleyan University in 2013 as the New York University Animal Studies Initiative’s Animal Ethics and Public Policy Fellow. He held visiting assistant professorships at Washington State University and Binghamton University, SUNY, before coming to Loyola. His main areas of research are applied ethics, especially environmental ethics, and the philosophy of science. One of his many academic publications is “Minding Nature: A Defense of a Sentiocentric Approach to Environmental Ethics”.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”
Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.
00:00 Clips!
00:50 Welcome
– Joel’s PhD thesis re: #sentiocentrism
– Our Sentientism FaceBook group
02:47 Joel’s Intro
– Asst Prof of philosophy at Loyola
– Director-elect of the environment programme
– Coaching the Ethics Bowl
– Institutional Review Board and animal usage ethicist
– Peace Corps volunteering in Panama
– Analytic philosophy focus
– Applied, environmental, animal ethics
– Philosophy of science and biology
– British #empiricists
– Grew up as a “latch-key kid” in Akron countryside “being in and messing around with nature” & rescuing animals (“Boy” turned out to be a girl…)
– Mother a nurse “seeing… the fragility of life very early on”
– Dad sold musical instruments “grew up around music and art”
– “All manner of outdoor adventuring… rock climbing, kayaking”
– “I’m a pretty hard-core board gamer… Evolution… Wingspan… nature themed board-games”
– “Within philosophy applied ethics can be a bit of a perjorative… not real philosophy”
– “I’m still trying to delay answering the question ‘what do I want to be when I grow up?'”
11:02 What’s Real?
– Raised in a minimally #protestant #Christian family “church on Sundays and that was about it”
– Mum was “more spiritual than religious”. Church for the singing and community more than belief
– Dad: “We go to church because that’s what we’re supposed to do”
– An inauthenticity about it “going through the motions”
– “I’ve never been religious or spiritual”
– “I think we’re all born atheistic at least in the sense that we don’t have any active beliefs in anything supernatural… we start as empiricists…”
– Being puzzled as a kid at realising most humans are religious “I thought I might have been broken!”
– Sunday school after church at 10 yrs old hearing about Noah’s ark “there’s so many species of beetle – this doesn’t make any sense at all… basic critical thinking”
– Anti-authoritarian and anti-dogmatism even from a young age
– “I’m probably an #atheist … at least a weak atheist… probably also an #agnostic “
– At 12 signing in to church marking “‘Do not wish to be a member of this church’… that got an invite by the pastor… where I was asked to apologise… I refused…. ‘I’m here under duress against my will’… I didn’t have to go to church any more after that.”
– Parents “let me find my own way”
– In college reading Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the New Atheists “I learned a lot from that… but you mentioned humility… they… struck me as divisive and not welcoming to people that might be open… if you’re not actively ridiculing them”
– “I grew up atheist but I’m no longer practicing” 🙂
– “I’m more of what one might call an #apatheist… apathy or indifference towards the existence or non-existence of god… it just doesn’t play a role in my life or my thinking academically”
– “I’m a naturalist… more as a method… not as an ontology”
– “How I write treats the world as given… I don’t make any assumptions beyond the empirical… supernatural entities – they just don’t play a role in my work”
– Scepticism (David Hume) and naturalism in balance
– The risk of scientistic excess that ignores any evidence outside of a formal scientific process
– Descartes, behaviourism, Jane Goodall’s fight to recognise animals as sentient individuals
– Cartesians may have mis-represented Descartes actual views to mitigate the “Problem of Evil” (lots of this suffering isn’t actually happening)
– Growing non-religious populations in the UK and US
– JW: How Sentientists have rich common cause re: sentiocentric campaigns (e.g. veganism) with those who have religious / supernatural / fideistic worldviews (and our Sentientism groups are open to everyone!)
– JW: Risks from non-naturalistic worldviews re: sentiocentric compassion: conditionality on compliance with rules, in/out-group constraints, divine command theory, arbitrariness, harsh punishments in this life or a hell thereafter
– JW: Sentientism worldview partly responding to a frustration with 1) Animal/ethical movements with poor epistemology and 2) Naturalistic / rationalistic movements that are brutally anthropocentric… “Can’t we have the best of both worlds? [naturalistic epistemology and sentiocentric moral scope]”
– From public/state schools to the Jesuit, Catholic Loyola University “a very strong sense of community… social solidarity, community building… social justice advocacy”
– Ignatian tradition informed by Saint Francis and Pope Francis’ focus on “caring for our common home”… “There’s definitely a lot of room for dialogue with people that do see themselves as being informed by faith”
– Dogmatism outside of faith communities: “I’ve had some alienating experiences… ‘you have to think this way if you care about animals’… a lot of which I don’t necessarily agree with… I haven’t really had a home in places that I thought would be a good fit for me… maybe I’m too much of an intellectual?”
– JW: “Total freedom of belief… believe what you like… but at the point where ungrounded beliefs start to be used as justifications for needlessly harming others – that’s where I want to draw a pretty clean line regardless of your supernatural justification, your religious justification, your traditional justification… Believe what you like if it’s astrology or flat earth, but when you’re going to start using that to justify harming or discriminating or exploiting others… that’s the boundary for me”
32:53 What Matters?
– “A standard, suburban white kid, middle-class upbringing… certain privileges… I didn’t have to think about certain things…”
– No philosophy in high-school “I didn’t really have a direction… I did not know what I wanted to do”
– Art education, then biology, “history of the western tradition” then philosophy
– “What grounds my morality?… Anti-dogmatism”
– Studying Kantian ethics. A professor who felt “’there’s the philosophy – that’s right…’ he never looked back”… “That’s always been the weirdest thing to me”
– “Philosophy is really good at working at the limits of human understanding… mostly good at eliminating dead ends and not so much at positively…”
– Hegel “Philosophy only being useful post-mortem… but we’re not the most progressive bunch”
– “I just never really got on board with this idea of being intellectually and personally invested… in a particular philosophical system”
– University of Tennessee’s focus on applied ethics (business, medical, environmental…)
– “Applied ethics has generally… tried to remain… fairly neutral when it comes to moral theory” e.g. Judith Jarvis-Thompson’s writing on abortion
– “I tend to think of moral theories as sort of tools for thinking but I’m not really committed to any particular moral philosophy”
– “My sympathies are more consequentialist than deontological or virtue theoretical – but I’m definitely not a classical utilitarianism in the sense of Jeremy Bentham”
– “I think good ethics does start with what’s true – with what’s real – we need empirically backed beliefs”
– People rescuing what they think is an abandoned baby deer “but actually it’s just hidden from predators by its mother and what we’ve done is separate the offspring from its mother. Morally a terrible thing but it came from a good place. But the person that was acting wasn’t informed by readily available facts.”
– Sometimes reality can be counter-intuitive e.g. PETA: “From an animal welfare point of view dairy is worse than eating meat… than beef… That’s super-counterintuitive.”
– “Outdoor cats are a pretty big problem… the more research is done the worse the problem looks”… billions of birds and small mammals killed… “but there was so much push-back… denying the science… because they didn’t like where that conclusion was going… they seemed to not care that the evidence was changing… that was very alienating for me…”
– JW: How ethical and epistemological errors feed each other and feed off each other
– JW: People working backwards from the implications then warping the facts or their ethics – instead of “having the intellectual honesty and humility and bravery to think through the evidence, think through the ethics, and then just face up to the implications which may well not be comfortable for you”
– JW: Activists and advocates: “We’re challenging others to do that… face up to, for example, the implications for animal agriculture… but quite often advocacy communities fall foul of that same problem because there are certain things we don’t want to face up to either”
– Darwinism as a way of understanding “where did we come from… is actually pretty important in understanding our place in the world with respect to animals and also how we think and how we fail to think well”
– Darwin: “He had some pretty sensitive and interesting things to say about our moral sympathies and how they’re quite shared with other animals – how could it not be?”
– Darwin’s notebook: “’Origin of man now proved… the person who would understand a baboon would do more to meta-physics than Locke’… it’s at least in the ball-park of right”
– “Understanding… proto-moralities in at least some… non-human animal species… that’s pretty important to understanding what matters and also how we think about what matters… the environment of our evolutionary adaptiveness seems to be really important in ethics… A lot of philosophers… don’t take this that seriously… it’s just wild to me”
– “The intellectual tools that we have… environments of just a couple of hundred people… is not developed for the kinds of problems that we face in a world of 8-10 billion people where we’ve basically hijacked the planet… climate change… timelines in millennia not in the next season…”
– “Morality as… an evolutionary tool to deal with conflict resolution within a social species… but mostly dealing with problems that are quite local in both space and time… that can get us to reflect on what might be some of our own shortcomings… maths… statistical reasoning…”
– “I don’t put a whole lot of stock in our pre-reflective moral intuitions including common sense for everyday morality”
– Rawls: “Reflective equilibrium… where we have considered moral judgements”?
– “I tend to think that that common sense morality has a morally problematic preservation of the status quo and it preserves the recent culture and the powers that be… pretty poorly adapted to dealing with… some of the most central moral problems of our time like climate change and biodiversity loss.”
– JW: Hangovers of religious thinking even amongst the non-religious? E.g. Humans as magically separate and distinct from the natural world “it just isn’t based in fact”.
– JW: The risks of descriptive ethics warping normative ethics… might makes right, in/out-group dynamics
– JW: “Everything about us is evolved… and we didn’t invent compassion”
– “Scientists have thought that reality was a certain way but they were really projecting what they wanted society to look like… survival of the fittest… nature is red in tooth and claw… justifies ruthless capitalism… That tells you more about the kind of outcome that that person wants – a certain kind of dogmatism… all they’re doing is projecting their biases into the natural world.”
– In biology the tension between “individualists and holists”
– “Secular humanism… where they get rid of the religion part but they keep the human supremacism… that’s very much alive and well in philosophy as well… ‘we’re obviously different and better than the rest of nature’ – wait what??”
– JW: Humanists and humanist organisations shifting away from anthropocentrism towards sentiocentrism (and therefore Sentientism) “they don’t have to be anthropocentric… even humanism will shift over time – despite the name”
– Feminism and intersectionality. Lori Gruen’s work. “Traditional animal rights groups were often deeply sexist… and also very, very white”
51:50 Who Matters?
– JW: A menu of anthropocentrism, sentiocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism…
– “I think I’m a sentiocentrist or a sentientist when it comes to the question of who matters… which beings deserve direct moral consideration… I think sentience is what matters in determining the question ‘which beings are moral patients?’”
– “It is literally true that non-sentient living things have interests… Peter Singer denies, for example that plants have interests… I just think he is mistaken about that”
– “I think that plants do have interests but I don’t think that they’re morally considerable”
– Peter Singer Sentientism episode
– “Preference interests do require taking an interest in, consciously”
– “I think sentience isn’t just being phenomenally conscious… it’s phenomenally conscious and some degree of a care or concern… having interests in that psychological sense… affective phenomenal conscious”
– “I can imagine there being an entity that is conscious but doesn’t have any cares at all in the world – I don’t think that being would matter morally… if you don’t care about anything why should I care about you?”
– “Singer thinks interests are always preference interests but some of the biocentrists have convinced me… Paul Taylor… talks about things being good for a being and beings have a good of their own… I think it’s literally true that watering a dry plant… is literally good for that plant… it’s in the interests of that plant to be watered… [not] because they’re sentient that it’s in their interests… it’s in their interests because it meets an obvious biological need having to do with their species and maybe even their individual flourishing…”
– Gary Varner and “welfare interests”… wellbeing in terms of biological flourishing not in terms of mental “welfare” states
– JW: So is it good for a ball to roll down an inclined slope?
– Joel’s “Is biocentrism dead?” paper. Biocentrists want to avoid the idea that “every artefact has interests or a good of its own… because that sounds absurd”
– “How do we overcome egoism?… how do we convince anyone they should do anything other than be a Hobbesian?”
– So many other capacities or characteristics of moral salience (e.g. having a heart-beat or fingerprints) “a lot of these ideas don’t stand up to a moment’s reflection… but I think sentience really does… if I can imagine myself in a persistent vegetative state I literally don’t care what happens to me any more.”
– “As we’re thinking about how to go beyond self-interest… something like sentience seems to be the right answer… merely being alive does not… merely being conscious does not… when Bentham said… ‘can they suffer?’ I think that’s pretty much on the right track.”
– Biocentrists… “a hidden assumption that we ought to do is bring about the most goodness in the world… I’m not on board… I’m not convinced… that we’re implicated in producing maximum goodness”
– “I prefer classic rock over modern rock”… the early biocentrists (Paul Taylor) have better positions than later biocentrists (Gary Varner, Nicholas Agar)
– “Gary Varner… he no longer holds this view… he’s now a sentientist… he realised the error of his thinking” vs. his book “In Nature’s Interest”
– “People that smoke like smoking – they have an interest in smoking… but it’s also the case that smoking is bad for them from a welfare view”
– “Paul Taylor… denies human supremacy… the things that we think are most important are most important for us…”
– Criticisms of sentientism and sentiocentrism as anthropocentric “’cos we’re starting from something that’s important about us”
– Josh Gellers Sentientism episode and hybrid / relational approaches
– “There might even be some anthropocentrism in that allegation…”
– “Whereas you are saying is that’s completely inverted… sentience is much more broad than us… existed before us… will outlast us… just because we have that capacity doesn’t mean it is ‘our’ capacity… accepting… a certain kind of capacity that is just out there”
– JW: Often ecocentrism shows its anthropocentrism by practically excluding most non-human sentients from serious consideration. And relational approaches can privilege human perspectives because powerful humans get to define the nature of the “relations”
– JW: “There’s always a risk that us humans will find some way of re-centring ourselves… and sentientism… is a powerful bulwark to reset that and stop us doing it”
– “Some of the biocentrists and ecocentrists have said some really problematic things… not just anthropocentrism but a certain male-centred point of view… a presumption that something like self-sufficiency… as a model. That doesn’t really work… disability studies… feminists… that’s not true of any of us really… we’re a lot more community connected and dependent on others.”
– “Denial on the part of domesticated animals that they’re no longer self-sufficient and therefore not morally considerable… that we’ve turned them into artefacts and therefore what happens to them doesn’t matter.”
– Intrinsic vs. instrumental value or intrinsic vs. extrinsic value
– Peter Singer’s utilitarianism and Tom Regan’s rights view on animal ethics “they were both trained in the analytic tradition… they have fairly austere conceptions about the nature of moral value… 1970’s-80… not long after moral philosophy was more a less a wasteland…”
– John Rawls’ defences of democracy and liberalism
– “There’s certain dogmatisms that might have limited Singer’s utilitarianism and Regan’s deontology… especially with what they have to say about wild animals… mostly focused on… ‘we are doing some really terrible things to domesticated animals… exploitation’”
– “They [Singer and Regan] have very little to say [on wild animals] and what little they do have to is deeply problematic and poorly articulated”
– Elliot Sober’s “N plus M problem”… trying to aggregate very different types of sentients (e.g. pigs and whales) “according to Singer and Regan… they are morally equivalent… there is no moral difference… rarity doesn’t hold any moral value whatsoever… Regan… ‘the last rhinoceros deserves no more protection than the billionth pig’… which is in some sense true… but from another point of thinking… that deserves more protection…”
– “I don’t think that value is out there in the world to be discovered like a lot of environmental ethicists think… [that] there’s value everywhere you look in nature… completely independently of psychological capacity… if there were no sentient beings – he still thinks the world would be full of value”
– Rawlston’s pluralism “he thinks every living thing is valuable, he thinks sentience is valuable, he thinks there’s value in diversity… in relationships… he sees value everywhere he looks”
– Intrinsic value “which inheres in the entity itself” vs. intrinsic valuing “where an entity that values values a thing in a non-instrumental way – so technically intrinsic valuing is an extrinsic non-instrumental value. So things like beauty, knowledge… it’s very, very important not just instrumentally… there’s quite a lot of intrinsic value in nature properly understood – but not in the way that a lot of environmental ethicists think about it”
– JW: Ensuring moral consideration, moral status and compassion are meaningful “… because quite often people will claim they care but act in a way that doesn’t even reach a minimally demanding baseline of obligation… non-maleficence… we wouldn’t needlessly harm, exploit or kill you”
– “Let me endorse anthropocentrism in a very qualified way… I am a moral agent. A plant is not… When I’m being asked to take somethings interests or wellbeing into account that’s making demands on me that isn’t necessarily reciprocal and as we expand the sphere of moral obligation there’s the worry that it cheapens it”
– “With biocentrism… if everything’s valuable then nothing is… JW: “An ethical flattening”
– “If it’s true that every living thing is morally considerable then every bacterium [in my body] is morally considerable… I just don’t know what to do with that from a practical moral point of view. I don’t want to say that this is the reason why I’m a sentientist – but it is at least somewhat restrictive.”
– Dale Jamieson: “If insects are sentient then all bets are off” (even as a sentientist)
– “Ultimately ethics is making demands on the limits of the behaviour of moral agents… I’ve got a finite life and lot of things that I’m interested in… there has to be an adequate reason for me to take a beings interests into account… that flattening of the moral universe ends up cheapening obligation to such an incredible degree…”
– “I’ve walked through the arguments for ecocentrism and biocentrism… part of me wants there to be a there there – but I’m not sure that there is”
01:22:19 A Better World?
– “I have an increasingly dim view about the role of philosophy in achieving effective change”
– “I don’t think that people… choose their beliefs based on reason and argument for the most part… I don’t think it’s primary”
– Reading the FAO’s “Livestock’s Long Shadow” report: “You read it and think… that can’t be true!… livestock is a central aspect to all leading environmental problems… but basically it is… we’ve hijacked the planet to feed domestic animals to feed to ourselves… we’ve harnessed the power of the sun in the most incredibly inefficient way possible”
– Sustainable human development, climate change, stemming biodiversity loss, coming to terms with novel ecosystems (due to human activity)
– “Ending at least exploitative industrial animal agriculture… mostly meatless diets… if you’re trying to convince people… the absolutism of vegetarianism can be too much… at least in a first conversation… maybe meat Mondays and then no meat the rest of the days… would do an awful lot for improving the welfare of animals, for the welfare of human beings and the welfare of the diversity of life as far as there’s a welfare there”
– Urbanisation and urban design
– “It’s definitely possible with even a population of 10 billion… that we could give back something like half the planet or more to re-wilding efforts… that’s only possible if we move beyond meat in the way that we currently do it – or move beyond it altogether… that seems to be the lowest hanging fruit of things that we should fix”
– JW: “Veganism… because even in non-factory, non-intensive farming I see that core exploitation and usage and ultimately the slaughterhouses where all those animals end up… as directly contravening even that minimal non-maleficence ask… I don’t think there’s any way of doing that all in an ethical way.” The risks of ethics/”humane” washing and bypassing “it gives us an excuse to never take that step back and look at these systems from the perspectives of the victims – the sentient victims…”
– Consciousness raising and systems change
– Representative democracy “it sounds nice we should try it sometime”
– “Moneyed interests play too large a role”
– “I don’t think I’m committed to the view that vegetarianism is morally obligatory for every human person or even just you and I. I think it’s a morally good thing and maybe even a moral ideal – but given where most people are I’m not sure whether that’s a realistic expectation.”
– “Are we really committed to the view that almost everyone is acting in a very seriously morally wrong way multiple times a day? There’s a worry that that view… might be a little bit of an elitist way of thinking about things… maybe I’m more of a pragmatist here than you are… maybe if we can reduce the harm…”
– “I’m definitely more confident that inflicting suffering on an animal is morally bad than I am in the view that animal death is morally bad… a sense of self and future…”
– “A minimally sentient being… I very strongly doubt that they have interests that matter with respect to their continued life”
– “A conceptual possibility – the idea that we could raise animals in a way that is conducive to their welfare… then their deaths… this would not work with USDA slaughterhouses… but… traditional local farming… I’m at least not willing to pass the kind of judgement on that I am the animal industrial complex.”
– “As an ideal something like vegetarianism, probably even veganism, seems right… In a thousand years… I like to think that we’ll look back on the period in time in which we raised and killed animal bodies for our sustenance as being a totally archaic, impermissible way of looking at things but that’s not the world we’re living in right now”
– JW: “Sometimes you just did need to recognise that enslavement of other people, regardless of how nicely you treated them, was just wrong and we just need to stop it – and actually it was easier than you thought it was going to be… I suspect that might be true here – because when we take the perspective of the other… the interest in continuing to live is probably deeply ancient… and therefore very probably distributed across the animal kingdom…”
– JW: “I get very nervous about… theoretical versions of animal agriculture that are suffering free… partly because they do not exist… so it’s not relevant to the ethics of today’s animal agriculture… but also because it just opens a door for people to carry on doing what we’re doing.”
– JW: “I recognise the need for pragmatism… but… I don’t want to lose that ‘imagining what it’s like to be the dairy cow having their calf taken away.’”
– JW: “Part of the reason people think of veganism as extreme or not pragmatic is because we keep telling ourselves that’s the truth… the reason it’s socially difficult is because we keep saying it’s socially difficult”
– JW: “The technology and the solution is there at scale already… what we really need is a psychological shift and the political will to make the change… if we just decide… the practicality is there and easy and straightforward and nutritional and delicious…”
– JW: “I’m nervous that we get trapped by the pragmatism into losing… the ethical perspective of the other”
– “We tend to think that the way things have recently been are the way things always have been and always must be.” JW: “An intrinsically conservative mindset…”
– “A car-centric culture that’s now baked into urban design… I just don’t like cars… the amount of space and resources we’ve given to them… with tax-payer dollars”
– Biden’s 100% tariff on imported Chinese electric vehicles “screw the middle class and the poor you’ve got to buy a 60,000 dollar Tesla to be in this electric game…”
– “As we work towards urbanising our species that probably needs significantly removing cars from the equation – electrified or not”
– “Liveable, walkable cities – getting us to wild places using public transportation – not weekend warriors driving Subarus”
– JW: “We need some more radical thinking… tweaks won’t do it… there are moneyed interests… the inertia of social norms and culture… enormous corporate and governmental interests that are driving forward an inertia and a conservatism about so many of these different industries… tobacco, big oil, animal agriculture, car industries… all of those industries just want to tweak things a little bit so we can keep doing what we’re doing. I think in all of those spaces we’re going to be forced into a more radical approach that will bring your 1000 year timeline into 20-30 years… not just be tempted into minimal tweaks because they’re not going to be enough – either ethically or environmentally”
– Personal sacrifice vs. structural change vs. results
– JW: “Virtue transformation is more about the humans… I’m interested in the consequences for the victims”
– “The number of vegetarians in India is greater than the population of the United States – it’s absolutely possible and actual to have large-scale societies that exist independently of meat… it’s probably a lot easier to achieve than we tend think but there are these systems that profit… that make these things hard to achieve”
– “Veganism… there’s a clarity or a simplicity there… this is a thing that can happen… people I know and respect actually live – they walk that walk”
– JW: “Maybe it’s more about focusing on the… practices that are done… you can step back from being an individual consumer… look at the processes going on… what is being done to the sentient beings within them and form an ethical view of that… then you can come back to your consumption decisions…”
– “Singer and Regan… the moral paradigm is ‘how I live my life’… that might not be the central question”
– “I am sympathetic with critical theorists… it’s these systems, these structures… collective action not individual behaviour… then think about how individual behaviour fits into that”
– JW: “When you dig under Singer and Regan the reason why they think I as an individual should act a certain way is because of the interests of the other… that’s something the critical theorists and the feminist care theorists and the relational people go back to too… the thing that’s in common is… ‘what’s in their interests?’… that, regardless of your ethical system, is what should ground what then becomes right for us to do – start from the perspective of the other… their interests, their values, their aspirations… then morality is about acting with that seriously in mind… There is a sort of link behind all of these different ethical theories that is about recognising the perspective of the other”
– “Look to the biology and our common sense understanding of what animals want… truly pay attention and listen and be informed by the science… and that’s not about us at all… that’s about following the evidence.”
01:46:30 Follow Joel
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