Josh Gellers is an associate professor at the University of North Florida. His work spans animal, environmental and artificial intelligence ethics and law. He is a research fellow with the Earth System Governance Project and is a Fulbright scholar. He is Author of “Rights for Robots: Artificial Intelligence, Animal and Environmental Law” (open access!).

In these Sentientist Conversations (subscribe!), we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”. Sentientism is “evidence, commitment & compassion for all sentient beings.”

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We discuss:

• Seeing the impact of climate first hand in South Florida
• Spanning “hard” and social sciences, rights, ethics and law, animal, environmental and artificial intelligence… inter-disciplinary
• Sophia the robot and non-human entity rights
• Growing up in a culturally Jewish household, with a mix of conservative religious and more secular liberal perspectives
• Doubting religion from an early age
• How could there be an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving god when there is so much suffering?
• Seeing examples of sexism and societal shaming within orthodox religion
• Kosher laws as historic public health recommendations
• Exposure to Buddhist animal ethics in Sri Lanka (living with spiders)
• Considering animals in diet for environmental reasons
• Trail maintenance/habitat restoration in California
• “Other ways of knowing and worlding” and pluralism
• Wanting to say there are certain universals, but hesitating to say “I have the right way”
• Jack Donnelly: “Relatively universal human rights”
• Aspiring to be more ecocentric
• Guilt and consciousness about how to be in the world
• Learning, respecting, humility, open-mindedness, compassion
• Doing the above without slipping into a relativism that allows the powerful to oppress others
• Anna Greer as an inspiration
• Critical environmental ethic with underlying pillars: Compassionate, resilience, sensitivity to the needs of others – ground rules as a safety net vs. relativism
• Needlessly causing harm isn’t compassionate, whatever your cultural norms
• People who care about people they know and people who care about people they don’t know
• Individualism and collectivism
• Extending compassion over increasing distances/abstractness
• Finding common ground vs. tribalism
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Who or what is entitled to moral or legal rights? – The Anthropocene dilemma. An ecocentric anthropic view – we’re all part of one ecosystem but humans have distinctive capabilities/responsibilities
• Fuzzy vs. clean categories re: human/animal/biological. The film “I am Mother”
• Sex robots
• Randall Abate: “Communities of the voiceless”
• Ecocide
• Relational moral consensuses can cause awful suffering/death (e.g. animal farming)
• Bio/ecocentrists that still exclude sentient beings from moral consideration
• Natural rights is “nonsense on stilts” – would have excluded many humans not long ago
• How do we broaden consideration?
• Taking the perspective of the entity being harmed/oppressed
• Indigenous vs. naturalistic/scientific epistemologies
• “Wading in the waters of other perspectives”
• Plant sentience and slippery slopes
• The weakness of singular approaches (vs. pluralist)
• Other factors (autonomy/capability/relations…)
• Degrees of sentience and/or moral consideration
• Sentience as an evolved class of info processing linked to an entity’s ability to model itself and its environment
• Animal farming implies zero moral consideration for farmed animals
• “Decentring the human”
• Queer theory, transhumanism and future developments in human rights
• Tech (e.g. clean meat) as a way of meeting cultural /societal needs with less harm
• Will robot rights follow animal rights? Links to human ethics
• How will we want to treat humanoid robots that are indistinguishable from humans (a Rawlsian veil that extends beyond biological substrates)
• Ethical/environmental challenges of economic growth (esp. China, India)
• Meat/dairy consumption as a marker of social status. Can we say that’s wrong?
• AI/robot ethics as another way to challenge our broader ethics. Just being human isn’t enough
• From robot rights to the rights of non-humans in general, including non-human animals
• “We can walk & chew gum at the same time” re: non-human & human ethics. An integrationist approach.

Josh is @JoshGellers and his home page is at joshgellers.com.

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at sentientism.info. Join our “wall” using this simple form.

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Thanks to Graham Bessellieu for his post-prod work on this video. Follow him at @cgbessellieu.