Magnus Vinding joins me on episode 252 of the Sentientism YouTube and the Sentientism Podcast.
Magnus Vinding co-founded the Center for Reducing Suffering where he is also a researcher. He is the author of Compassionate Purpose, Why We Should Go Vegan, Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It, Reflections on Intelligence, You Are Them, Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others?, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications, and Reasoned Politics.
00:00 Clips
MV: “I do defend a moral realist view that is centred on experience itself… Most people wouldn’t necessarily deny that other animals experience. Do we admit their weight, the weight that they deserve?… Why couldn’t compassion be enough? I don’t think it’s enough to just have good intentions… Sentientist democracy or sentiocracy. I do think that’s a natural next step.”
00:37 Welcome
JW: “You’re probably one of my most requested guests. And when I tell people, ‘Oh, I’m interviewing Magnus…’ they’re like, ‘About time…How has it taken this long? You’ve done nearly 250 episodes and you have not spoken to Magnus!’”
02:37 Magnus’ Intro
MV: “I’ve been trying to grapple with many of these questions myself for many years… almost two decades now, since I was a late teenager.”
MV: “In terms of my own journey, I was influenced in quite a major way by the book The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris, which I encountered back in 2010. And that book was… the first introduction… to ethics for me. I hadn’t really encountered anything that argued for any kind of systematic ethical view before that point.”
MV: “Sam Harris argues for a moral view centred on the wellbeing of conscious creatures and argues that that is what ethics is ultimately all about… I found that to be quite compelling…”
MV: This focus on sentient welfare seemed to me almost like obviously correct as something that, one can always debate exhaustiveness, but certainly it seems like it must be included in what matters. That seemed quite obvious.”
MV: “What I do today is very continuous with that. It flows from that… I work at an organisation that I’ve co-founded called the Center for Reducing Suffering, where I work as a researcher and author, exploring questions about how we can best reduce suffering.”
MV: “Also exploring questions… about suffering-focused ethics in particular… questions about why prioritise suffering compared to other things, and also questions about which kinds of suffering to prioritise and to what degree. These kinds of questions are the ones that I’m mainly focusing on, given that I think that’s ultimately what matters most.”
The Tobias Baumann Sentientism Episode 180: Suffering Risks
JW: “… there’s this trilogy of books… Suffering-Focused Ethics and Reasoned Politics and most recently Compassionate Purpose, reflect a lot of the deep questions we ask here.”
06:30 What’s Real?
MV: “That’s a good question. So honestly, I guess with a question like this, it’s very difficult to recall the details exactly. But broadly speaking… I was raised in a very mild Protestant context, or almost secular Protestant.”
MV: “There were some Bible stories for children, or sometimes read as good night reading… But I do vaguely remember that I took ideas about God and Jesus fairly seriously in a way. Maybe in some ways more than my surroundings… if there were a god it seemed like a fairly significant thing.”
MV: “So I do vaguely remember, even in kindergarten, having some thoughts, and maybe one could call it prayers… it was certainly on my mind somehow…”
MV: “That’s an interesting distinction between being a cultural Protestant versus something that more has to do with beliefs…”
MV: “In a Danish context religion doesn’t take up that much space. It is pretty much in the background. And people do have, when they’re 13, 14, the confirmation ritual, which I think most people still do, but that has more of a secular significance, the way it’s seen and treated. But I think religion did fade more and more into the background.”
MV: “… when I was 18 years old I had a pretty strong break with it, actively distancing myself from it and seeing Christianity and other established religions as being clearly made-up things.”
MV: “I saw many of the bad sides, but it was maybe a bit one-sided… not seeing why people are attracted to religion and what it can give people in terms of community… And even the reason why they have emerged quite convergently in history.”
MV: “I’m reminded of this evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Henrich, who has made the remark that when studying human evolution, even if you are not interested in religion, you just can’t avoid it because it tends to come up so much.”
MV: “But I did gradually become less and less interested in religion, even as it was never my major focus in life. And then at 18 I did turn very hard into an atheistic and strongly naturalistic direction and began, let’s say, just exploring much more in that direction and gaining a greater interest in science and philosophy.”
MV: “I think it was actually quite easy, because I was already not really particularly immersed in it, also socially… it felt a bit like clarifying certain thoughts… that was about it. Maybe in some ways it was perhaps a difficult time, but that’s… just a normal part of being an 18-year-old.”
MV: “A theme also was just part of exploring deep questions… it’s not necessarily that interesting a step to look at some religion or some set of religions and deem them to be, let’s say, impossible. That still leaves many questions and it’s an initial step that doesn’t give you much of a positive answer to anything.”
MV: “It also gets to what is the scope of naturalism… one thing that doesn’t necessarily fall outside the scope of naturalism is the many varieties of consciousness. I suppose one can be, in one sense a boring naturalist and even atheist, while also valuing a very large variety of experiences, including all such states of consciousness.”
MV: “Many people, when they have such states, it does, if not question their more naturalistic view, at least expands their conception of what naturalism can include, encompass.”
MV: “In my own case, I do think that many of the things that people appreciate in religion are things that one actually can have in a naturalistic context or within a naturalistic framework. So, for example, obviously many religions will emphasise compassion, but that’s not something that requires that we go beyond naturalism.”
MV: “I would also say something like a strong sense of connection, which can even be to something larger, such as a project of trying to improve the world, which still doesn’t necessarily have to be something that goes beyond our world. But it can very much be beyond our ordinary concerns and also beyond a narrow conception of self-interest.”
JW: “I feel a sense of awe and wonder and emotional connection and, in a way, a sort of transcendence, even though I have a completely naturalistic way of understanding the world. And those things probably feel quite similar to people with a religious worldview who feel or wonder and a sense of connection… you don’t have to give those things up.”
JW: “I do see my personal experience, my lived experience, the phenomenology, whether it’s every day or under the influence of psychedelics, if I were ever to try them, those things I think are evidence as well.”
JW: “I don’t think we should exclude those because they’re mental or they’re to do with consciousness. I think we should include those as aspects of reality. But like any other type of evidence, we should be sceptical of them. If I had a psychedelic experience where I encountered seven-dimensional meta elves, some people would go, ‘They are definitely real,’ and I would go, ‘Isn’t it amazing what the human mind can do?’”
MV: “I think it does raise an interesting question also about what we actually understand by naturalism… there is a very interesting philosophical dilemma… Hemple’s dilemma, usually raised for physicalism in particular but can also be applied to naturalism more broadly.”
MV: “If one says that one is a physicalist, a natural question is, ‘Okay, but what does it actually mean to be a physicalist?’ Either one can say that physicalism is the view that our current laws of nature accurately describe reality. But that view is quite false, right? Because we know that already our current physics isn’t complete.”
MV: “But then on the other hand… if one wants to define the physical as some kind of ideal physics or future physics, arguably that becomes quite vague, such that it can become trivial.”
MV: “A similar challenge can also be applied to naturalism… we can either appeal to existing, maybe fairly specific yet incomplete theories, or on the other hand we can gesture at something that’s more broad and perhaps vague.”
MV: “If we say from the outset that anything we discover will be naturalistic or will conform to naturalism, then arguably it’s almost an empty conception or definition of naturalism.”
JW: “One way of putting that is to say… assuming that ghosts and demons and angels are supernatural… if we found evidence of them then they become part of the natural world. So they’re no longer supernatural. In that way is it sort of circular?… That’s partly why I come back to this focus more on epistemology than the ontology.”
JW: “The ontology should always be probabilistic and provisional. But the thing I do want to commit to is the epistemology, which is basically just having a good faith, humble, critical thinking approach to trying to interpret information from reality.”
JW: “As against deferring completely to authority or revelation or a perfect pure faith-based approach that’s impervious to evidence and reason… against dogma.”
JW: “It could still leave you open to all sorts of weird and wonderful things. And modern science is already quite weird and wonderful? Who knows what more we’ll find out.”
JW: “Humility is also important because it does mean that while I’m quite comfortable saying I’m an atheist, that doesn’t mean I’m 100% sure there’s no God? As the evidence changes, if I want to say… I have a naturalistic epistemology, I should still be quite open-minded even for ideas I think are very, very unlikely.”
JW: “So that’s why I tend to focus back on the epistemology rather than the ontology, because as soon as we start focusing hard on ontology we risk slipping into dogma, even if they’re scientific dogmas or atheistic dogmas.”
JW: “The angry atheists or some science communicators… they almost end up replicating a different sort of dogma which feels very similar to the religious people or the supernatural and the spiritual people they’re criticising… You need everyone to have a bit more humility.”
MV: “And in those kinds of contexts, I can’t help but then think about the underlying sociology or social games… which I think often is a hidden layer beneath a lot of posturing and the overconfidence that people often show.”
MV: There can actually be various social motives… a kind of superiority compared to other groups… look how silly they are… also trying to signal one’s loyalties and belonging to a certain group.”
MV: “The membership signals can then differ depending on which group you want to show that you’re part of, which is actually a key step of self-awareness…”
MV: “We often have these audiences that we’re trying to impress, which can be a huge source of bias, including overconfidence.”
JW: “That’s one of the challenges of having a good epistemology… we need to apply it to ourselves… We need to use it to understand our own limitations and the social pressures we’re under and the fact that we’re not perfect truth-seeking beings. We’re primarily social primates… use that as a source of humility.”
JW: “The Sentientist commitment to evidence and reasoning sometimes sounds obvious. It’s like a truism. Why wouldn’t people want to ground their beliefs in evidence? But it can be quite sensitive because of those social reasons, because there are areas that people want to reserve and keep separate from the application of evidence and reasoning. They might be religious… A personally deeply held belief or wishful thinking or a conspiracy theory… it could be anything.”
JW: “Sometimes people will say, when I’m talking about the Sentientism worldview, is ‘Why do you have to keep focusing on evidence and reason and fact and naturalism? Isn’t compassion enough?’”
MV: “I would expect the disagreement to be more commonly… about what counts as good evidence… some people would consider the Bible or the words of ancestors to be good evidence.”
MV: “A lot of the development or evolution in epistemology has been changing standards when it comes to what we consider good evidence, like how much weight to give supposed authorities versus, say, more reproducible sources of evidence.”
MV: “But why is epistemology, or reason more broadly, important?… I don’t think it’s enough to just have good intentions or good motives. One can have good intentions and good motives and yet still ultimately not manage to create the changes one wants to create… One could still be, for example, heavily biased, even if one has compassion.”
MV: “One could end up having compassion only for a select group of beings, or even perhaps for entities that might not warrant compassion in the first place… If one mis-projects suffering out in the world where perhaps it isn’t.”
MV: “Those are some of the reasons why we ultimately need to… try to make sense of what’s actually going on around us and create better maps as to what’s going on so that we can navigate better, to put it a bit poetically.”
MV: “Of course there is a fair objection where one could say, ‘but doesn’t even reason also have problems when it comes to its own limitations and problems?’… I would grant that kind of concern… but… it’s just the best we have… the alternative would be that we don’t try to make sense of things.”
MV: “Of course, maybe for some people that might be perhaps tempting, and in some ways maybe an easy way out.”
MV: “There are good examples we can give of how reason has actually helped us make a lot of progress in terms of making sense of things around us… science, broadly construed, is a good example of what we can do if we apply reason… paying attention to empirical evidence and trying to make sense of that.”
JW: “If you want to make a better world, it’s useful to understand it reasonably well, and I haven’t found a better toolkit yet.”
JW: “At the same time, part of a good epistemological naturalism is recognising that perfection is probably unattainable… All we’re ever going to do is get credences that are provisional and probabilistic, and if we’re insisting on perfection, we’re likely to fall into dogma again.”
29:55 What Matters?
MV: “The kind of Christianity I found myself in wasn’t… all that explicit. And I don’t know if I thought about ethics in terms of religion… I’m not sure I thought a whole lot in those terms as a child. I do remember obviously feeling sympathy, and that would probably in practice have been my main guide in many situations.”
MV: “In school… if someone was being bullied, that was something that to me obviously felt bad… they should be helped and shouldn’t be bullied, obviously… my moral reasoning perhaps looked roughly like that. It wasn’t systematic at all or even necessarily all that conceptual.”
JW: “And I think that’s an extremely common starting point. Unless you do have a worldview that really imposes an ethic on you, be it divine command theory or an obligation to follow certain rules or an honour code, unless it’s really hardcoded in that way, I think the default childhood experience is pretty much as you’ve explained. You probably feel some sort of sympathy and empathy for others. You feel some compassionate motivation. You want to be kind to those around you, try and avoid being cruel to those around you, as a sort of fairly intuitive starting point.”
MV: “The book I mentioned at the beginning by Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape… that was pretty much how these questions came to be salient for me… Of course there was still a lot of work to be done in terms of teasing out more specific implications of those kinds of very broad statements and ideals.”
MV: “Taking the wellbeing of all sentient beings into consideration, that’s something that many people will agree with in the abstract… but of course the actual implications can be complicated and maybe also quite inconvenient for many people.”
MV: “In my own case, I think it was a couple of years, even three years, after I encountered that until I became vegan.”
MV: “I had actually thought a lot about these questions, of the suffering of all animals being important, including animals in nature as a real, serious problem, because being subjected to suffering due to natural reasons doesn’t mean that it isn’t bad or that it isn’t worth preventing if possible. But that was a more gradual process. That’s a good example of a lot of cultural conditioning to question and undo.”
JW: “My understanding of what Harris was doing in that book… he was trying to ground morality in the experience of the individual… suffering, flourishing, happiness, pleasure, pain… He was suggesting that should be applied to anyone who can experience, not just humans. Although Harris, frustratingly, doesn’t seem to have ever put that into practice himself… He doesn’t seem to believe his own philosophy.”
JW: “The other thing he was doing, which many people have challenged… he was trying to bridge what’s called the is-ought gap… the David Hume idea that over here you have facts and over here you have values and you can’t get from one to the other.”
JW: “Sam was saying… there isn’t a gap because you can have facts about a being who can suffer and that suffering is intrinsically bad, which has a moral character that links to the moral… So you can get from facts to morality.”
JW: “There are… a few different challenges. One is, some people will say, ‘Look, I get that there’s a soft connection between facts and values, but you still can’t get a moral imperative. You can say that suffering is intrinsically bad, but you can’t explain from those facts why I should care… you failed at breaching that gap.'”
JW: “Others will resist the idea of our morality focusing on the experiences of individuals because they’ll prefer a different sort of ethical structure. They might prefer something that’s focused on a care or a relational ethic, which is about the relations between us, or a virtue ethics, or something that’s based around justice or social contracting or the attribution of rights. There’s loads of different ways of doing it that might link back to the experiences of individual sentient beings, but they don’t absolutely centre them.”
MV: “These questions are often considered to be the core of what’s called metaethics, exploring questions about what is the nature of moral claims… the main dispute is between moral realists and moral anti-realists…”
MV: “In the book I published back in 2020 called Suffering-Focused Ethics, I do defend a moral realist view that is indeed centred on experience itself, and in particular the intrinsic badness of suffering.”
MV: “My view has become more nuanced over time… much of it is terminological, and also the different associations people have with different words when it comes to moral realism.”
MV: “I still do find some version of moral realism to be possible, but it’s also not really something that I’ve been focusing on so much… since I published that book, it’s not really been my central concern.”
MV: “I’ve sometimes debated questions about metaethics with Brian Tomasik, who’s written essays on reducing suffering… it was interesting to notice how he and I could disagree apparently quite strongly on metaethics and yet agree also quite strongly on normative ethics and actual real world priorities… that was fairly instructive and made me think… maybe this [metaethics] is not that important, or at least not among the most important things to be focusing on.”
MV: “Maybe the normative side is the more relevant one, and especially the actual practical side, exploring how can we reduce suffering in practice?”
JW: “…in the philosophy field… you just get this uneasy feeling that we’ve gone into something that feels more semantic and more about concept engineering than something that really has practical reality in the real world.”
JW: “One of the good things about a sort of suffering-focused ethics approach is that it resonates so widely… Almost everybody experiences their own suffering and intrinsically feels that as, it’s a negative valence experience by definition. If it feels bad it’s suffering… so it’s bad.”
JW: “Almost everybody knows that, and almost everybody will recognise the suffering of others is bad for them as well. If you have any sort of common sense morality… you can see that suffering is bad for others and we should have a moral concern for the suffering of others.”
JW: “There’s enormous, rich common ground there around suffering, and maybe even the positive side, the flourishing side of experience as well.”
JW: “But there are some concerns people have about just focusing on suffering too narrowly… the idea that if we’re focused on suffering and we want to eradicate suffering, maybe the only way of doing that is actually for all sentient beings to go extinct… if we focus too hard on suffering, that can lead you to some sort of extinctionist agenda… some people might say that’s fine, but many people intuitively have a very strong negative reaction to that.”
JW: “That links to the idea of whether death intrinsically is negative. If you could have a suffering-free death, is that a morally neutral thing or not? And again, most people have a deep intuition that even murdering someone painlessly is very badly wrong, whereas a very narrowly suffering-focused ethic is less open-minded about that. I had quite interesting conversations with Peter Singer, when I interviewed him twice, on that topic as it relates to animal agriculture.”
JW: “And there’s a third one, which is about freedom. And I think this partly comes from the idea that, yes, the suffering of others matters, but there’s a nervousness about us assessing them from the outside and taking decisions on their behalf, which makes people feel a bit twitchy. It’s like, someone else in power has put me in a spreadsheet. They’ve racked up my utility points and now they’re taking decisions about me… And that makes people nervous in general.”
JW: “The importance of freedom is one way of responding to that… freedom is important because what I’m doing by thinking about freedom is allowing the other being to take decisions that are in their own best interest, and most of the time they probably will… So freedom is important, not just suffering.”
MV: “One initial clarification is that there’s a very broad variety of suffering-focused views that one can hold, and these include views that are pluralistic in nature. So, for example, you mentioned death and you mentioned freedom, and those are good examples where there are indeed suffering-focused views that do give that importance also.”
MV: “The academic philosopher Jamie Mayerfeld, who has written a book called Suffering and Moral Responsibility… he defends a very strongly suffering-focused view where our main… moral duty is to reduce other’s suffering, particularly intense suffering. But he also insists on the importance of respecting personal autonomy as something that is in itself important.”
MV: “He has a pluralistic view according to which the reduction of intense suffering is extremely important and so is respect for autonomy, individual rights, and… he also sees welfare as being more than just experiential. So there are other things that are important even though suffering is a central importance.”
JW: “So it might be suffering-focused but it’s not suffering only.”
MV: “It is quite common, especially among academic philosophers, to endorse pluralism of some form.”
MV: “There are other examples, including the philosopher Clark Wolf, who has also defended very strongly suffering-focused… asymmetric views in population ethics. And he’s also someone who endorses a pluralistic view according to which we should respect other people’s and other beings’ rights… including when it comes to, in the most extreme cases, killing…”
MV: “When it comes to views that are framed even exclusively in terms of trying to reduce suffering or improve welfare… a very important clarification is to also take into account the instrumental effects and the instrumental importance of respecting these other values that might be supposed to be irrelevant if we don’t give them intrinsic importance. But they can actually still have enormous instrumental importance.”
MV: “A good example… is that from virtually any consequentialist view, even if one doesn’t think that knowledge is intrinsically important, we still generally recognise that it has immense instrumental value given how it can enable us to act better generally.”
JW: “Which is why epistemology is important.”
MV: “And the same generally applies in the context of suffering-focused ethics… a colleague of mine Teo Ajantaival, he has made this point in a book also available for free, called Minimalist Axiologies, where he highlights this often neglected instrumental importance, and how one can have positive value even within a purely suffering-focused axiology, a theory of value. It’s just that it’s positive instrumental value.”
MV: “That includes even potentially new lives. It also includes extending lives, and it includes knowledge and not least respect for norms as well, including common sense norms. These are some important qualifications that I think are worth stressing.”
49:45 Who Matters?
MV: “Ever since I was a child, I had a very strong interest in animals… but I don’t know if it was necessarily mainly characterised by sympathy. I think I was almost descriptively interested in animals. I just had a deep fascination with many kinds of animals, I guess especially the big cats.”
MV: “But at the same time, I also grew up having a dog in the home, and I suspect that played a big role, in the sense that the dog was like a family member or a good friend… I suppose that’s a very common thing, that we treat our companion animals pretty much like family members, and it’s a matter of course that they have perspectives and that they matter. So in that sense it seems like almost all of us have some opening to going beyond human concern.”
MV: “Ideas played a pretty major role in terms of expanding… taking a sympathetic perspective on other beings… probably most people wouldn’t necessarily deny that other animals have experiences that are significant for those beings themselves. But then it’s almost a matter of how we perceive those experiences… and how we process them. Do we admit their weight in some sense… the weight that they deserve?”
JW: “In a way it’s deeply frustrating, but it’s also hopeful that most humans, to some degree, already agree with us in theory… we should have compassion for all sentient beings and that suffering is intrinsically bad… that can be almost a trivial point of agreement. The challenge then is in the human psychology and the sociology and the politics and the will and the akrasia and all the other stuff that gets in the way. But there is some hope that there’s some latent agreement.”
JW: “But you took that seriously… Most people would say, ‘Yes, I care about animals, because they’re sentient…’ but then don’t really apply that in their lives except with their companion animals…”
JW: “Sam Harris wrote a book about it… his moral scope in The Moral Landscape was explicitly not just human. He broke anthropocentrism and went to a sentiocentric scope… he wrote a book about it, and even he doesn’t take it seriously.”
JW: “I don’t want to psychologise him, but he’s a really interesting example. He’s not just a normal person on the street. He’s written a book about moral philosophy and even he didn’t take the steps you took.”
JW: “So what made you read his book and take it more seriously than he has? What made you actually take some practical steps, and what was that process like given you live in a culture that largely doesn’t agree with you?”
MV: “I do think we are probably all, unfortunately, moral hypocrites to some extent… Unfortunately, we can all point to some ways in which we could do more and be more in touch with ongoing suffering and make more efforts to alleviate and prevent it. So, it’s more a question of degrees of consistency?”
MV: “But when it comes to taking a step… one’s age can probably be a pretty big factor. When you’re younger, obviously you tend to be less set in your ways and you might have a lot more freedom and flexibility to behave from a place of, ‘let me try to think things through and then let actions be downstream from that’ rather than the other way around.”
MV: “I think something like having the actual independence… to have some space to think things through first of all, and then secondly to go through with it with one’s actions. I can see how that can be more difficult than it was for me, because I wasn’t particularly, maybe that relates to Protestant culture… but I wasn’t that strongly tied to some community that pressured me strongly in some particular direction.”
MV: “I had a lot of independence… our natural default is very much to sort of go along with what happens around us and to just let the wheels turn as they have been doing.”
MV: “I guess I was quite lucky, as I imagine probably many of your viewers are as well, to have had some freedom, some space to say, ‘Wait a minute, what actually makes sense here, both in theory and then practically?'”
JW: “Adopting veganism was one part of that process. Was that a difficult transition for you, or, like your movement away from Christianity, was that quite an easy transition?… quite often there are some interesting echoes in the stories… because in both cases you need the space and the clarity to look at your existing social norms that you’re part of. You see that they’re to some degree harmful and you need some bravery to sort of break that, and that can be difficult in terms of social norms and context. Was that as easy as moving away from Christianity, or was it tougher?”
MV: “…it took me roughly three years to take that step… there was at some level more resistance… I also harboured some ideas about veganism being completely unworkable health-wise. I guess I had just picked that up growing up.”
JW: “Where are you going to get your protein?”
MV: “Exactly. I think that’s part of the reason it took me a long time, and also just the cultural momentum in general. And interestingly, I hadn’t encountered much of a utilitarian or consequentialist-based case for veganism at the time, which is one reason why I went ahead… Only a few months after I became vegan I published a book called Why We Should Go Vegan, to try to present the case, the arguments that had actually persuaded me eventually.”
MV: “I was very naive in fact back then about the impact that a book like that could have… it’s actually the book of mine that’s been downloaded the most on Amazon… it ended up ranking quite high on Amazon’s algorithm a decade ago or so.”
MV: “Maybe it was also the fact that I had myself been inspired by Sam Harris, so I probably was quite slow partly for that reason. He wasn’t someone who strongly made that case, but then it helped that I later found David Pearce, for example, who does emphasise veganism.”
JW: “David was my guest on episode six… one of my earliest guests. Wonderful mind.”
JW: “I’m glad you made that utilitarian, consequentialist case because… in the animal advocacy movement… many people who take a more rights-based approach will criticise utilitarianism for being too weak on things like taking a welfare-based approach or one that allows certain types of exploitation if there isn’t harm or allows painless killing. And I think that’s a useful, healthy debate to have.”
JW: “There can be a danger that, if you take a rights-focused approach and you use that to challenge utilitarianism, you almost encourage utilitarians to move away from the idea of veganism and abolishing the exploitation of animals.”
JW: “Whereas to my view, I think you can take a virtue ethics approach, a utilitarian approach, a consequentialist approach, a feminist care ethics approach, a rights-based approach. All of those approaches can and should lead you, if you have a compassion for all sentient beings, basically to the same point, which is we shouldn’t be needlessly exploiting, harming or killing any sentient beings.”
JW: “I do worry sometimes that criticising utilitarianism in that way might even encourage utilitarians to go in the wrong direction. I want to kind of bring them in and say, ‘Yes, your moral system also takes us in the same direction,’ even if for slightly different reasons.”
MV: “There are some fair criticisms… utilitarianism and consequentialism more broadly… can be quite vulnerable to motivated reasoning… one can always say, ‘Well, I don’t really know, I can’t really quite predict consequences in this case,’ which, to be fair, is often very, very difficult.”
MV: “But it’s interesting to notice that utilitarians do generally endorse fairly strong and strict norms when it comes to other human beings. When it comes to humans, utilitarians do tend to take fairly strong stances against racism…”
MV: “And so, similarly, I do think that many of those same reasons also apply when it comes to non-human animals… There are good reasons to adopt fairly strong norms…and to have a certain principled stance. Which, by the way, can also be easier in terms of day-to-day calculations. If you just adopt a certain principled stance, thereby you can actually also have more time and freedom for thinking about other, maybe even more consequential, questions than what to consume.”
JW: “That shift to veganism focuses practically on rejecting the human exploitation of primarily non-human animals… that are under our control in labs and in farms and so on… But if your focus is on a sentiocentric moral scope, all sentient beings, all beings that can suffer, that can flourish should matter, that takes you way beyond the non-human animals that are under human control. And you mentioned even early on you had some sort of affinity for animals living free-ranging in the wild or maybe liminal animals.”
JW: “Those can be challenging for many vegans and animal advocates because we’re so focused on ending the obvious horror of what humans are doing today directly and deliberately, as acts of commission, to non-human animals, for largely trivial reasons, that thinking more broadly can feel like a distraction. So how have you come to think about the ethics of liminal and wild free-ranging animals and those types of topics?”
MV: “A very helpful frame… is to think about it in terms of anti-speciesism. Because interestingly, when we observe humans suffer for natural reasons, whether it be some kind of natural disaster or even when humans are victims of predation, for example, we generally don’t consider that to be something that’s unproblematic, obviously.”
MV: “We generally consider it something that’s actually worth preventing to the extent that we can.”
JW: “We don’t say we’re not responsible, so we’re not going to help. We go help.”
MV: “I’m aware it is a very controversial step to apply that to other animals as well. But I would argue that if we take anti-speciesism seriously, that that actually is the implication, or even just if we take sympathy for their experiences seriously. That there is a real experience out there, as inconvenient as it is to admit that or to face it, it is nevertheless a reality that other beings experience intense suffering every single day out in nature.”
MV: “One can acknowledge that as a real problem without necessarily endorsing ill-considered actions. Because obviously there’s a huge risk that we could go out and make things worse. And that even applies at many different levels. First of all, we could make the natural situation much worse. And also politically we can cause a huge mess by going out and saying extremely ill-considered things that people are going to be very strongly opposed to, both, in our own country but also just on a global political stage.”
MV: “So it’s important to keep those two things in mind at the same time, that we can have a huge problem that’s worth taking seriously and ideally is very much worth addressing, while also being thoughtful, being tactful and being strategic about how we can best address it, which very much is an open question that I think merits deeper consideration and more research. And that is often what many people working in this field are advocating for, trying to build more of a field, trying to have more of a movement, a more competent movement. And science about that.”
JW: “We might not know what to do about it, but we shouldn’t exclude those beings from moral consideration just because we’re unsure about how to respond… They should still be in our moral consideration, even if the problem is difficult, even if some aspects of it end up being intractable.”
1:08:29 A Better World?
JW: “We’ve said here’s our epistemology, our humble way of understanding reality. Here’s who we should care about, all of the sentient beings. So what the hell do we do next?”
MV: “Suffering-Focused Ethics… presents a fairly broad case for giving strong priority to the reduction of suffering… that’s the moral foundation for the two books that I’ve done, or two major books I’ve done since published, namely Reasoned Politics and most recently Compassionate Purpose.”
MV: “Reasoned Politics starts out by presenting a fairly general framework, a two-step framework… where the first step is to clarify our basic values, to try to argue for and clarify, ideally in an open-ended discussion and conversation…. then secondly comes more of an empirical step of clarifying, given that we have certain values, how can those values best be realised, which is more of an empirical question.”
MV: “Politics gains more clarity by separating what are values questions and what are more empirical questions about how certain values can be actualised.”
MV: “What I then proceed to do… is that I adopt these broadly suffering-focused values at the level of the values, without being strictly committed to any one conception of suffering-focused ethics… if our goal is to reduce suffering, if we adopt that as the first value step, what which policies seem best for that purpose?”
MV: “And that is a very complicated question… many different lines of evidence… across different domains… I have five different chapters… the general question of nonhuman animals in politics… liberty… equality… justice, and then finally democracy… And in each of these I explore various lines of evidence to try to figure out which general policies and even which institutions seem most helpful if we’re seeking to reduce suffering.”
MV: “And these are obviously extremely difficult questions and it’s not like we can have particularly high confidence in our answers… but I still think we can point to some directions that are more reasonable than others.”
MV: “For example, in the case of democracy, I do argue that liberal democracies do generally seem to do quite well across many different measures. Although it is… very complicated, and one complicating factor is that liberal democracies also tend to have more wealth, which they can also spend in harmful ways.”
MV: “… nevertheless people in liberal democracies… they generally do begin to spend less, they tend to be more conducive to veganism and moving away from animal exploitation… Even though there’s a lot of uncertainty there… it does seem to me that it makes sense to try to promote liberal democracy… That’s one high level conclusion of the book.”
JW: “You start from the fundamentals rather than looking at the different political systems… You’re reasonably positive about liberal democracy. I’m also pretty confident that you couldn’t take a reasoned politics approach that would end up authoritarian or fascist or dictatorial or even theocratic, right? I’d struggle to understand how you could get to those places from a reasoned politics start.”
JW: “Some of the fieriest conversations we have in our Sentientism Facebook group are about these questions. Does Sentientism lead you towards anarchism or towards a compassionate sort of capitalism or towards a socialist approach or a communist approach?”
JW: “Some people are absolutely insistent that socialism and communism are explicitly authoritarian, so cannot be consistent with a Sentientist or a reasoned politics worldview. Other people are absolutely convinced that capitalism is intrinsically exploitative, so is not consistent with a reasoned politics or a Sentientist worldview.”
JW: “How much wiggle room… and pluralism… is there around liberal democracy, or do you think liberal democracy is pretty solidly your best answer for a reasoned politics?”
MV: “In some ways the case I make for it is quite conservative… It seems like among those it appears to look better overall, but that’s not to say that it’s by any means an ideal system. In fact, I do argue for taking steps beyond that.”
MV: “Following Alasdair Cochrane’s Sentientist Politics, his argument for Sentientist democracy or sentiocracy, I do think that’s a natural next step as an improvement of democracy, rule by the people. I think ultimately, we want to have rule that’s in the interest of sentient beings, where we also find ways to represent the interests of non-human beings in the political process.”
JW: “I can imagine different ways of organising the economy, for example, maybe more capitalist, maybe more state role involved. But I think whichever mode of economic organisation you have, I struggle to see how you could govern that in a way that was not based on a Sentientist democracy or sentiocracy. That seems something that needs to carry through the politics. You need some form of representation of all of the beings involved.”
JW: “And as soon as you start to centralise that or use a more sort of command and control or authoritarian approach, you’re into risky territory. So, whatever your thoughts on economic models, it feels like the politics has to be driven by the beings who are governed and impacted by it. So that leads you back to something that has to be sentiocratic at its core… unless we can find some benign AI overlord who knows what we need better than we do.”
MV: “But I think it is a relevant observation, right, that when it comes to idealistic discussions about different economic systems, it’s worth noticing that seemingly any economic system that’s been tried has been all too compatible with the large-scale industrialised abuse of other sentient beings.”
JW: “Human and not.”
MV: “It seems safe to say that that’s not a sufficient solution, at least in the forms that such systems have been tried… there might also be an inclination to want to conveniently sidestep, whereas I think that probably if we want changes like that, there isn’t really any way around actually directly trying to address that particular issue, as opposed to talking about some kind of other system where, well, given the way human culture currently is, unless we change that particular aspect, it would still persist, unfortunately.”
01:19:29 A Better World: Compassionate Purpose
JW: “Let’s go from the global and the political and the big picture back down to the individual. I found your new book, Compassionate Purpose, so fascinating, because you might see it as being part of the self-help genre, which to my perspective is 90% bullshit. So it’s wonderful to have your contribution.”
JW: “It feels like what you’re trying to do is address this tension between the… philosophical… big picture… trying to understand things at a very deep level… trying to care very powerfully and very broadly. And I love that aspiration.”
JW: “But it seems very much at odds with the fact that we’re a weird sort of evolved, biologically evolved ape with extremely limited capabilities and capacity. There’s this really weird tension between genuinely wanting to make the world better and the fact that we’re an individual animal, although strangely enough on a Zoom call. And that tension can play out in all sorts of unhelpful ways for people.”
JW: “It can lead people to give up and become doomerish. It can lead people to burn out because of the weight of the suffering in the world. It can lead people to withdraw and go and hide away in a bunker and just say, ‘Look, I can’t cope. I have to just centre myself and those around me.’ Or it can lead people into weirdly deluded conspiracy thinking, crazy stuff, or some sort of search for transcendence that takes them somewhere very dark.”
JW: “It’s probably always felt like this, but the current global zeitgeist feels very much like your intervention is needed, because I think you’re trying to find a path through that recognises who we are as animal beings but recognises the sheer scale of the challenge and the opportunity we’re facing.”
MV: “Compassionate Purpose is… a self-help book that tries to ultimately point beyond the self while also very much including ourselves! It is a book where I try to look at essentially self-help from a perspective of trying to reduce suffering effectively in the world. How can we live our personal lives better for that aim, or including that aim at the very least?”
MV: “So obviously when we take suffering seriously and when we turn towards suffering and face it and seek to reduce it, that can come with a lot of challenges… it can take many different forms… including the very individual, the empathic distress that we can feel when we look out on the world and its suffering, and also a lot of social challenges. That one can maybe feel isolated, maybe not feel at home in the world or in one’s society or even among those close to us.”
MV: “Those are quite serious challenges that shouldn’t be minimised. It seemed like having a book addressing that was worthwhile. So that was why I set out to write this book. And perhaps it should even have been the first step… to actually have the tools to deal with this before we dive into the very deep end.”
MV: “My approach is very similar to what I did in Reasoned Politics, just at the personal level, namely trying to look at empirical evidence as to what has some support when it comes to how we can address these challenges better. And it turns out there is a lot of relevant evidence and that we have, thankfully, a lot of useful tools.”
MV: “One that is very much worth highlighting is self-compassion… this was not something that I had a strong desire to write about when I set out to write the book, but it was something that very much emerged as quite important… It turns out that burnout, including what’s sometimes called compassion fatigue, like feeling burned out about the suffering of the world, it turns out that that is strongly connected to low self-compassion.”
MV: “There are also experimental studies where self-compassion interventions help with this form of burnout. It seems like a very important tool, and maybe quite surprising, that being supportive to ourselves is very helpful when it comes to facing the suffering of the world.”
JW: “Do you think it’s important that people do that self-compassion genuinely? Because you’re a sentient being, I’m a sentient being, we deserve our own compassion. We should be compassionate to ourselves. I have seen some people in various movements, particularly activists, almost do it in quite an instrumental way, where they’re like, ‘Look, I will give myself self-compassion not because I really care about myself but because I want to avoid burnout so I can make the world a better place.’ I think you’re making a mistake. You should actually be compassionate to yourself, not just because it’s another way of increasing your effectiveness. It should be genuine compassion.”
MV: “I think it’s a great point, and I think it can probably also be, maybe surprisingly, difficult. Many people aren’t necessarily used to relating to themselves in that way, so it can be quite a process to move from it being initially maybe just words, but then moving towards a place where it actually becomes something that’s more deeply felt and actually prioritised, where one actually does generally care also about one’s own suffering, including the suffering we feel about other suffering.”
JW: “It’s partly difficult, I think, because many people have gone through a journey of starting out with a maybe more narrow, even egotistical focus, and they’ve worked so hard at breaking that open, expanding their moral scope and moving to a much more impartial ethics. So then self-compassion feels like going back the other way again.
MV: “One can also maybe see it as a fuller completion, right? Because if one insists on universal compassion, that obviously doesn’t exclude oneself, right? That also has to be included.”
JW: “Are there any other particular themes you’d want to call out? Any tips or tricks or how people could start now or ways into this?”
MV: “One that’s been very important for me personally is to focus on the positive difference that we can make, to focus on that change that we can make out in the world, those beings whom we are able to spare from suffering… In a big world where there is so much suffering going on, it can be proportionately quite easy to lose sight of that real difference that we can make… how real and significant that difference we can make is.”
JW: “Opportunity.”
MV: “Exactly. To really come back to that continually.”
MV: “In addition… when it comes to social challenges, I would emphasise real-world pragmatism as a goal… I suspect many of us can be highly idealistic in our relationships and about how other people should behave. That’s certainly been true of myself in the past.”
MV: “Obviously there’s a lot to be said in favour of being principled and having high moral standards, but it’s very important not to lose sight of practical realities, and that includes also our own social needs and our need for connection… If our standards for social connection are tantamount to ‘we must have moral perfection,’ then that pretty much excludes everybody.”
MV: “There is this spectrum of greater or lesser degrees of moral consistency, and none of us ever reach perfection… It’s important to see that that applies to all of us, including ourselves. That can also help create a space for some forgiveness, and then some connection that can happen despite all the moral imperfections that surround us. Just the reality that it’s a deeply fallible world and that we have to just contend with that reality and actually live pragmatically.”
JW: “The universe doesn’t owe us perfect moral truths or perfect epistemological truths, and we better just get used to that. But the opportunity and the aspiration to do better and to know more is there and deeply inspiring.”
MV: “This thing of keeping going despite a lot of imperfection… Whether that imperfection is in other people or whether it comes from ourselves, that’s not something that should inhibit us from keeping on going and persisting. Also considering the broader background imperfection that we’re up against… not to be inhibited by perfectionism and to persevere in spite of it.”
01:32:23 Follow Magnus
JW: “You’ve written those three books, but maybe now you’d recommend people start with Compassionate Purpose and they’ll be then more ready to engage in Suffering-Focused Ethics and Reasoned Politics. So maybe that’s the order people should read them in now.”
MV: “I think that might be a better idea.”
MV: “The books I’ve written are all available for free in digital formats and they can be found, on my own website, or also on the Center for Reducing Suffering.org.
CenterForReducingSuffering.org
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