Jessica Pierce (https://www.jessicapierce.net/) is a bioethicist & writer. Her work focuses on human-animal relationships & interconnections between ecosystems & health. Her “All dogs go to heaven” blog at Psychology Today is here.
In these Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?” Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is on the Sentientism Youtube here and you can find the podcast versions here on Apple and on all the other platforms.
We discuss:
- Training in philosophy & religious studies
- How ethics intersects w/biomedical science
- Working for 10 years in medicine
- Medicine can damage and enable health
- Shifting to focus on non-human animal ethics
- Companion animal relationships & the experience of losing Ody
- The parallels between non-human animal & human care/ethics
- Breaking the default assumption that “humans are the raw materials of ethics”
- Growing up in an “outdoorsy” family in the Sierras & Colorado
- Attending Buddhist temples, synagogues, churches. A wide variety of religions
- Finding kernels of truth in every tradition but “you don’t want to get stuck in one”
- Studying religion from undergrad to phd
- “How is someone with a phd in religion an atheist?” “When you study religion it turns you that way.”
- Not rejecting the theist traditions, but also not embracing them
- If there is some “god” (with a small “g”) then it’s in nature and if there’s a “heaven” then its a state of mind, a state of being in harmony and peace.
- “Humans are not the centre of the universe”
- Our attitude that we can just exploit and use the world is an offense
- “I would put myself in that camp of naturalism”
- The appeal of pantheism
- The trap of human arrogance (both scientists and religious people seeing humans as “like gods”)
- The need for humility, respect & non-violence. Treading lightly
- Humility & open-mindedness and doubt are the power of naturalism and science
- John Gray’s “Straw Dogs”
- The naive assumption that once we see animals as sentient that will solve all of our problems
- Jessica’s book “The Animals’ Agenda”
- Showing slaughterhouse footage to animal ethics students, seeing their distress, then hearing them say “but I really like steak”
- Recognising the moral value of someone (as with humans) doesn’t automatically solve all problems
- Facts and ethics as reasons for leaving religion “these are not deities I want to worship”
- Compassion & its evolutionary roots
- A sense that even rocks have value and a “lifecycle”
- Ethics as intuition followed by rationalisation to justify those intuitions (some of which aren’t that good)
- Mindfulness emerging from compassion
- “Compassion without attention to the details can backfire”
- People feel compassion for companion animals, but if they don’t understand the needs and perspective of the companion they can cause harm
- Trying, however imperfectly, to take the perspective of other sentient beings
- “Saving” worms from the sidewalk as a child, then seeing them drown
- Sentience as information processing, maybe with a fuzzy boundary vs. non-sentient information processing
- The need for humility & prudence re: which entities are sentient
- A sense of reverence can go beyond sentience
- The choice between eating a plant & an animal is clear. It doesn’t hurt the plant
- Caring about “ecosystems” & Gaia but still eating obviously sentient beings
- Actions are more important than rationales. Causing less suffering is good whatever the reason
- Why “vegan” is off-putting, “a dirty word” to many people
- Climate change is a “less threatening” story than animal ethics for those who consume animals. The implications of what we have done is a “powerful pill to swallow”
- A future where people have compassion for other beings & become more scientifically oriented
- Is animal consumption necessary for survival in some places?
- People going to KFC probably don’t even consider that they’re consuming an animal
- Don’t educate kids about nature through capturing it, teach through going out into it
- How would dogs live without humans (forthcoming book with Marc Bekoff)
- Pet-keeping (captivity) would go away in a utopian future
- Non-animal research alternatives
- Ending zoos
- “Compassion isn’t a limited commodity – The more you build the more you have”
- “If we can learn to treat animals better we’ll learn to treat each other better”.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at https://sentientism.info/. Join our “wall” https://sentientism.info/wall/ using this form: https://sentientism.info/im-a-sentientist. Everyone interested, Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our groups. Our main one is on FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/groups/sentientism. Thanks Graham for you post-prod work: https://twitter.com/cgbessellieu.