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Jack Waverley is a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Manchester. He uses marketing and consumer research to protect and promote the interests of all animals, including humans. Jack teaches on a range of BSc and MSc courses in the Fashion, Business, and Technology (FBT) group. He also supervises a number of PhD and dissertation students. He is an academic expert member of the Academy of Marketing and a member of the Vegan Society’s Research Advisory Committee.
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
00:52 Welcome
– Jack’s talk at VARC 2025
– “The VARC conference is like being in the future… where we want to get to… it really does feel like you’ve jumped forward 10 years”
02:49 Jack’s Intro
– A marketing consumer researcher… focusing both on consumption of animals and consumption for animals
– “Markets as a system of morals… material objects moving around… infrastructures”
– “How we move from one system to another”
– The AI question “I very much adopt a sentiocentric or Sentientist perspective”
– “The reason I’m concerned about animals is because they are sentient”
– “If AI were to become sentient… then of course they would fall within… my moral circle”
– “Most people think about ‘what can AI do for me… for humans?… How does AI affect humanity?'”
– “I’m much more interested in ‘what can we do for AI?’… our responsibilities for AI… how can AI help post-humanity, more than humanity, all sentient beings.”
– “I’ve ended up in this… very anthropocentric tradition… marketing and consumer research… but bringing in animals and bringing in AI”
– A new field of #SentientistMarketing ?
05:14 What’s Real
– Growing up in “a nominally Christian household… but we never went to church… more agnostic”
– “There was never an explicit framework of… this is why these things are good or bad”
– A liberal, progressive upbringing “live and let live”
– “It wasn’t quite a blank slate [re: moral thinking] but it was as close as you probably get”
– “Broadly naturalistic is my baseline… interested in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics… scientific ways of approaching the world”
– “I didn’t really go out looking for any kind of revelation… [or] any strict rules… [or] some sort of authority figure”
– “… quite anti-religion… all of the religious experiences I had were very much organised religion and I didn’t really connect with that”
– “I didn’t mind other people having religion but for me it just didn’t make sense… I was naturalistic”
– Interested in fantasy and sci-fi novels and gaming “this idea of magic in fiction was quite appealing to me… looking for mystery…”
– “I wouldn’t say I was looking for the supernatural… just looking for things that were less intuitive or less taken for granted.”
– “That’s now led me into academia because anything that’s settled… is not interesting to me.”
– “Areas of debate… confusion… areas we’re not sure about. That’s what attracts me as a researcher and as an educator.”
– “Anything we find and explain is of course, by default, natural”
– “For me, the supernatural is just what has yet to be brought into the natural fold… or something that isn’t actually real that we think is real”
– “So I am a naturalist, in short”
– Encouraging wonder but discouraging acriticality
– The risks of a narrowly scientistic approach becoming dogmatic “It’s against the scientific method. It’s the scientific method distorted.”
– “That middle ground. You’ve got the wonder… maybe magic does exist, but let’s try and establish how we would study that.”
– Kant’s idea that “we don’t have access to reality per se”
– “Whenever anyone says ‘this is real or this is not real’ I’m very suspicious”
– “In everyday language the use of the word ‘real’… plays a socio-political role… to establish authority… my perspective on to you”
– “Usually my ‘real’ is real and your ‘real’ is ‘just ideology’ or… ‘just fantasy'”
– “Very rarely do people think their own ‘real’ is the wrong one”
– “Marketing is so much more than advertising… creating products and services and experiences that people want… creating consumers that we think want these products, services and experiences.”
– “We have to create consumers… demographic segments, psychographic segments… we’re creating these ideas… we train consumers to think of themselves in those roles.”
– “We create the realities that we purport merely to describe…”
– “Like Judith Butler’s idea of gender being performative… gender isn’t a fixed reality it’s something that we’re continually reproducing individually and as a culture. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist… but it only exists because we’re framing it in this particular way… all of our societal structures are built around a particular frame.”
– “If we say that sustainable marketing is impossible, we’re going to make it impossible.”
– “If we say sustainable marketing is possible, it could become a possibility through a lot of work.”
– “Marketing is a performative act. We’re creating the markets rather than just finding them out there and describing them.”
– “The extreme of relativism is of course solipsism… I am the only thing that exists… there’s always a second step… if I was the only thing that exists nothing could surprise me because I’m creating everything… The fact that the universe resists me… surprise me… means there’s at least one other thing in the universe… the thing generating the universe around me… There’s at least two things”
– “There probably is a universe full of various different things”
– “The moral question… a precautionary principle… I should act as if everything else does exist and therefore I should at least consider them.”
– “Some have argued that… everything is socially constructed…tomorrow we could just reconstruct reality as we wanted to.”
– “Looking beyond the human – we really need a post-human performativity… all the other things… trees, bricks, animals… they’re not necessarily aware of our social constructions… they’re affected by them of course.”
– “Even the slightest bit of independence from constructionism introduces something into this ontological system which means that we have to consider reality per se”
– “From social constructivism to a posthuman constructionism… everything is constructing reality together”
– “Humans tend to think of construction in terms of language… animals do communicate, but all the other entities in the universe are constructing themselves and each other in ways that are not linguistic… That’s where we get stuck.”
– “Constructivism… it tends to emphasise language. It’s very anthropocentric in its thinking.”
– “If we want a sentiocentric or Sentientist understanding of reality we really need to understand construction in a very broad way… of course construction is a very anthropocentric metaphor”
– “Reality is continually being remade… the political upshot of that is that we can make it better.”
– Can insentient entities like bricks and trees really participate in construction?
– How ideas of “extending” still imply humans are at the centre. “I think it needs to be more like distending”
– “The human is also inhuman or non-human… within us we have viruses, various small biospheres… body parts… organic and inorganic matter… ingesting information… ingesting food… diseases… gut biome… the boundary of the human is very blurry at best.”
– “Even the thing that I call myself, the human, is populated by all sorts of non-human actors”
– “When we really decentre the human… distend rather than extend… I’m not saying that trees and bricks are necessarily sentient… I’m not a panpsychist… there are things out there that are interacting whether or not there’s a sentient entity looking at them”
– “If we’re really going to think of… reality as a process… something that is always being made, 0.0001% of it is sentient and even smaller is human. Most of the stuff that’s going on is unperceived, but we’ll obviously have a chain reaction that leads to something that is perceived. All of that is part of the system.”
– “If you want to say to me ‘Why do I have a particular perception when I’m eating this meal?’… to fully explain it you’d have to trace it back thousands, millions of years… supply chain… previous experiences… a lot of non-human interactions…
– “That’s why my understanding of constructionism is really quite flat… everything is at least worthy of consideration”
– “A rock is different from a cow… a person… another cow… they should all be part of our ontological framework”
31:44 What and Who Matters?
– “Common sense… I approach very delicately… common to who… what time period… different cultures… social groups…”
– Immorality and amorality vs. a tacit, latent morality that’s “uncodified”
– “I always had concern for animals”
– “I used to consume animal products because… that’s what, in the UK.. everyone does. But I had the sense that it was wrong.”
– “I never had a strong enough feeling about it to do anything about it.”
– Teenage years… “creeping feeling that I should be vegetarian”
– University: “I would dabble in meat-free Mondays… it was very half-hearted”
– No “Eureka moment”
– “I had this belief that it was wrong and then my actions were doing the wrong thing… this cognitive dissonance… eventually I just thought I would try going vegetarian for a week… then it was two weeks”
– “If you’re doing it because you think it’s wrong… to exploit the animals… surely you shouldn’t be drinking milk… having eggs… wearing leather.”
– “I might as well just go back to eating meat and be a hypocrite… or I need to go the whole way and go vegan”
– “Somewhere along that journey… this kind of abstract journey of ‘why am I doing this?’… that’s when I moved towards Sentientist thinking”
– “I had a naturalistic epistemology already… I had this vague ‘morality is good’ framework… a very amateurish interest in philosophy…”
– “At some point it was quite clear that they weren’t separate… this emotional embodied desire to reconcile my cognitive dissonance… this abstract interest in morality… these came together to live the values that I was trying to develop intellectually”
– “Latent, semi-conscious, sub-conscious feelings of ‘something’s not quite right here’… now looking back… I have the concepts that I can place on these memories to say ‘that’s why this was wrong’ but at the time I did not have the language.”
– A friend who said “don’t go vegan because that’s too difficult for me to cook”… “But by the time I went vegan there was enough going on in the marketplace that it was easy for him to adapt.”
– “I don’t know, if I was born 20-30 years earlier, if I could have gone vegan… The resources available… physical products… practices… information… was not as well developed or was not as well disseminated.”
– “Nowadays the market is booming… plant-based products… vegan products… reducetarianism… flexitarianism… ideas… courses… cookery books”
– “It’s very hard to say now that you couldn’t at least explore these ideas because they’re everywhere in the market”
– “The number one issue that I encounter professionally and personally… is the material basis… ‘How do I do this?… I might agree with you… but I can’t find a bean burger that’s just as good… an oat milk that has the same properties when I’m cooking…”
– How even a moral imperative gets blocked psychologically by people insisting alternatives are exactly identical to animal products
– “It’s about consumer value… ‘I’m used to this product being amazing…’ It’s very hard to get a consumer to accept something inferior even if it might feel morally advantageous”
– “It invokes these ideas of forsaking, sacrificing, losing out… it becomes a zero-sum game where you have to choose morality over pleasure”
– The uncanny valley affect (as with human-similar robots) re: alternatives to animal products “we have the same with meat or dairy… The consumer’s OK if you say ‘this is tofu, it’s nothing like meat… give it a try’ but when you’re claiming it’s a burger or a chicken wing… the bar is set really high”
– “Even if it was reaching the benchmark… you’re looking out for the tiniest little [differences]…”
– “When I first transitioned I used loads of them [animal product alternatives] because I couldn’t cook differently – I had to just basically replace everything”
– “As I built my confidence I moved away… just look like plants now… it doesn’t look like meat or dairy any more”
– “The holy grail for marketing and for morality… will be things like lab-grown meat or other technologies that can perfectly replicate the traditional product”
– Other blockers re: impacts on animal farmers, tech phobia, culture
– “Some of those concerns are genuine. If we replaced agriculture with 2-3 massive tech firms that produce all of our food – probably not a good idea”
– “But if we have a more heterogeneous food system… we can produce different kinds of food without having to harm billions of animals every year…”
– “My question… what do consumers need to get them to buy into that”
35:50 A Better World?
– “I do have a utopian vision… [but] ‘one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia’”
– “Pluralistic and pragmatic… whatever works to improve human lives, to improve non-human lives”
– “A world in which all sentient life is considered equitably”
– “Equality means treating everyone the same. But that doesn’t seem to make sense to me… people are all different – they have different needs… animals are of course all different. So what I need… is very different to what a pig needs or what a bird needs… different needs… all the way down to the individual level”
– “What I really want to push is equity… fairness in treatment and fairness in outcome”
– “Look at all sentient life… consider what they need, what they want, what they desire, what they deserve. To try and build systems in which that could be at least possible.”
– Education, legal systems, products and services that we create
– Making markets more animal inclusive. “Inequitable inclusion is simply being present… doesn’t mean that you’re being treated very fairly.” [like animals in farming]
– “We’re looking for the step above that… being included and then being equitably treated… respected and considered”
– “There will be scenarios where these things can’t be perfectly addressed… The starting point is at least that they are being considered equally… that we’re trying to build equity into our systems”
– “We need to move to a post factory-farming system… use far, far fewer animals. Personally I would say that we should not use animals at all.”
– “We should be developing much more equitable, inclusive relationships with them [non-human animals] which does not involve commodifying them at all”
– “I’m not so much of an abolitionist that would say that we can’t have any relationships with animals at all… We shouldn’t live separately from the animal world… we’re already populated by all sorts of non-humans”
– “To try to create glass domes and remove all the birds and insects… Are we going to live in a world where there’s no non-human life at all? It’s not really appealing to me.”
– “Where I do agree with abolitionism is that we need to move away from this reform, incremental, welfarist model where we just make things a bit less for the animals”
– “I’m quite happy to accept various different ways to get towards this model… A lot of people can’t just go vegan overnight… the infrastructures can’t just shut down from one day to the other”
– “We probably need to slow down the conveyor belt first before we can switch it off”
– “My utopia would be that we would live in much more post-human, more than human, multi-species societies where all sentient life has some sort of rights.”
– “If AI become sentient then all the same things apply”
– JW: Could enforcing a separation between human and non-human animals itself be anthropocentric? “Maybe there’s a potential for us to actually help… in ways that go beyond ending exploitation, oppression and harm… to being a productive member of an inter-species Sentientist society” e.g. wild animal ethics
– “When we talk about sentiocentrism… what we’re saying is be more consistent… Everyone has examples… they love their cat or their dog… if you see a pigeon injured or a duck or a fox people will go out and help.”
– “We’re trying to… unlock more of that sentiocentric thinking that’s already there and make it more consistent”
– “There’s this sense that they know that when they look at another animal that there’s something [someone] looking back”
– “This sense… that there’s something in the machine… is quite natural… intuitive… tapping into that and trying not to over-philosophise it”
– “All of these highfaluting words that we use like sentiocentric or Sentientism is actually what they’ve already got in their minds. It’s just unlocking it, labelling it a bit more and maybe encouraging them to apply it a bit more consistently.”
– “I don’t think we’re having to make them go on such a huge moral transformation”
– JW: Challenges to markets and capitalism despite their claims of centring freedom: Are they inherently exploitative? Can “the market” feel authoritarian? Aren’t corporations anti-democratic. Power dynamics concentrate resources and influence. Subsidies and aggressive marketing can warp the “free” market.
– “I’m biased in a way because I work in marketing… but I describe myself as a critical marketing and consumer researcher… I don’t think markets are brilliant and everything should be a market but… I don’t think markets are all bad either… it’s always morally ambiguous”
– “Three stages…:
– Short term: “Realpolitik – it’s what we’ve got… we’re going to have to work with the tools we’ve got. We might get rid of markets at some point but we need to play the game to begin with”
– Medium term: “If we got rid of capitalism what comes afterwards?… Communism… there were various power dynamics that filled the vacuum and produced some sort of stratified system… it’s not necessarily just capitalism that’s the problem… there’s something in humanity… we have these power dynamics… we have these exploitative tendencies… altruistic tendencies as well… we’re a mixed bag…”
– “I don’t think just getting rid of the macro system or replacing it is the solution – there’s something inherently within us.”
– “Unless we’re going to engage in some sort of mass genetic engineering experiment where we change our fundamental human condition… there’s always going to be… even at the micro level… there’s power dynamics… within families, within couples, within friendship groups. What we see at the macro level is just the extrapolation of that”
– Long term: “Work with markets in the short term… in that better future I imagine some form of exchange will exist… [Eric Arnold] eco-economies, neo-animism… that’s just one of many [alternative model]?
– “Utopian writings around posthumanism… They all share this idea that there’s still going to be some sort of exchange… energy… matter… information… even if money doesn’t exist, even if there’s a flat society, we’re going to be exchanging things in order to survive.”
– “We’re all co-constructing reality together and part of that is exchanging matter and energy and information”
– JW: “Collaboration and co-operation generally are good things right?”
– “Markets are always seen as competitive fields… they are also collaborations… exchanges that are beneficial to both parties…”
– “We need to think of markets in a more complex way… in the animal rights… vegan movement… there is this express or latent anti-market sentiment. I do understand why because presently markets tend dramatically towards the exploitative end.”
– “I can imagine a future where markets exist and that markets actually benefit animals and humans”
– “I am working towards the idea of animal inclusive markets… that encourage consumers to benefit humans and animals… in which somehow animals are given the agency to make choices.”
– JW: If the root of economics is value and that includes value to any valuer (i.e. any sentient being) #SentientistEconomics
– “Value is a core concept… we have loads of papers on value… nothing about non-human valuing as such… an interesting area of future research”
– “It would be very sentiocentric because if there is no being perceiving there’s no value… we could get into arguments about inherent value…”
– “We’re always imagining it from a god’s eye view… the inherent value of the world or ecosystems… looking down on it as some sort of deity… You’re still implicitly a valuer”
– “I can’t imagine an entirely empty [no sentience] universe where there’s just stuff interacting but it’s still valuable… you need a sentient entity to value.”
– “Diversity of value… each individual… species… breed… genus… would all have their own biological and social inflections that would make them value things in different ways”
– “The value of a particular object would be valued very differently… depending on the affordances that it gives to each individual”
– Thomas Nagel’s “How do I know what it’s like to be a bat so how do I know what a bat would value in a marketplace?”
– The challenges of understanding how other humans and individuals of other species value things
– “We can use our knowledge, we can observe, we can use precautionary principles… systems that give agency to the animals… [so they can indicate what they do value and disvalue]”
– Jack’s VARC talk “Selling ourselves without selling out”
– Veganism’s combination of a philosophical stance and practical boycott
– “What’s amazing about veganism as a philosophy is precisely this very concrete practical step that you can take.”
– “Every moral philosophy has a practical implication… but they tend to remain quite abstract”
– “With veganism it’s quite clear what you should do… even if you’re not a vegan it still inspires you hopefully to make different decisions every day… 2-3 choices every day… fashion… transportation”
– “Climate change… yes we can all do something but it still remains quite abstract. For veganism, although you don’t meet the animal you feel like you have this one to one… I didn’t eat a chicken today… it feels a little more concrete for a consumer.”
– “That gives us an opportunity… You’re empowered as an individual… less of this idea of ‘oh I can’t make a difference’… we can see now that the market is radically shifting… the vegan market is growing… continually developing…”
– “If anyone says ‘oh there’s no point me doing it, it can’t make a difference’ I think we’ve got the evidence now that the markets can shift dramatically”
– Environmental, health benefits, health service and NHS cost savings “All of the other reasons to go vegan are now aligned that you don’t necessarily have to buy into the whole philosophy to engage with it… not only as a consumer but as institutions”
– “I feel like we’re getting this gathering pace of reasons and actors and resources all reaching a critical mass”
– “A lot of excellent work is being done on the conscious side of things… narrative framing… images… visceral or intellectual arguments… messaging”
– “What’s less discussed… the unconscious side…”
– “Research saying we need 75% of a menu to be plant-based for people to see it as normalised… encourage this kind of tipping point”
– “Unconscious nudges… institutional changes… more options available… engaging with decision makers… these are the levers that we should be working on”
– “If we can persuade one business leader to go vegan… inform some of their decision making… ripple effect far greater than convincing one average consumer”
– “Let’s try and convince the average consumer as well… but if we can be more strategic… it is a very resource limited movement”
– “We need every tool in the toolbox… different kinds of people doing what they’re good at to engage with people who are all diverse… I don’t think there’s a one size fits all marketing campaign”
– “This vision… this Sentientist, post-anthropocentric market society”
– JW: Coping with resistance from corporate interests, government lobbyists, culture, identity. Conflict, collaboration or the failure of capitulation “parts of the movement might even be co-opted by the animal industries”
– “I don’t think the full frontal attack is necessarily the best approach”
– Shocking, visceral documentaries or images can work “A lot of the people… who got into the movement did so because they saw something very shocking and it completely flipped their thinking”
– “The vast majority have probably seen things like that and it hasn’t worked… we need other strategies”
– “’First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win’… we’re kind of in the laughing/fighting phase”
– “Animal rights… abolitionism… even animal welfare was largely ignored for centuries… and yet now we’re talking about it”
– “A mixture of poking fun at veganism… and… fighting it… They’re taking this seriously now.”
– “The fact that there is resistance means that there’s movement… this is a positive sign”
– “Find non-confrontational ways to engage… ecological arguments first then bring in the animals… people’s self-interest… health… it could save you money… everyone else is doing it…”
– “If it gets someone on board I’m pro it”
– “The thing that seems like a win… welfare… although I’m always happy to support a campaign that would get rid of cages… castration… these horrible practices… if the net result is that then people say ‘we’ve done something so we can leave it’ that would not be a great step forward”
– “If we can make animals’ lives better in the current system… We’re probably not going to get rid of factory farming before that particular pig is slaughtered so if I can make that pig’s life better that’s still a big win for me”
– “[But] Does that then remove energy because the majority of people think that there’s been a win… I’m very ambivalent about welfare approaches.”
– “We need to listen to people more… understand what resonates with them… we’re going to help get them on board”
– “Once we reach that elusive tipping point… normalised and naturalised… many other people will follow…”
– “Many people at heart are sentiocentric Sentientists… ”
– “If we can make the system around them more Sentientist I don’t think there’ll be that much resistance from the average person”
– JW: “If most people had grown up in that Sentientist world they wouldn’t be fighting it. People wouldn’t be saying ‘let’s start a factory farm’… everyone would think they were crazy. And they would be.”
– “If you are someone… in marketing and consumer research… an area that traditionally has not been engaging in these big questions… animal rights… AI being sentient… what’s a better future… please get involved”
– “This isn’t just a space for moral philosophers and political scientists… It is a space for everyone… you can bring something to this movement that we need.”
– “If you don’t see someone like you that probably means that someone like you is needed in the movement so please join”
01:21:40 Follow Jack:
– Jack at Manchester University
– Jack on LinkedIn (please get in touch)
Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop.