John shares his story, from being a devout Pentecostalist Sunday School Teacher in Nigeria to being a Sentientist, atheist, vegan academic and author. Video version here.
John is Strategic Lecturer in the School of Law and a Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. He is a cellist and dancer.
We discuss:
- John growing up in Nigeria, then Italy in an evangelical, pentecostal family (both parents are missionaries and reverends) and community
- Being a sunday school teacher and devout believer
- Challenging those beliefs as a teenager, both re: evidence and ethics (e.g. rejecting religious homophobia)
- The rich integration of Nigerian culture, racial identity and religion and how that made leaving religion behind a difficult struggle
- Finding the courage to be open with parents who are very deeply involved with the church
- How some religious communities accept non-believing, “cultural” community members while others reject those who drop their supernatural beliefs
- Veganism being seen as a rejection of a culture rather than an individual moral choice
- How having freedom, time and distance from our culture can help us assess and improve our worldview
- Value as the foundation of ethics, not religion. Value comes first
- A pluralistic conception of value from the perspective of each individual: community, family, friendship, relationships, experiences
- Sentience as a sufficient ground for considering a being valuable because they have a perspective. Things can go better or worse for them. Morality is caring about that perspective of others
- Whether non-sentient beings have intrinsic or just instrumental value
- Is beauty of value even if no sentient ever experiences it? Let’s not destroy the Mona Lisa just to be safe
- The danger of bio/eco centrism and environmentalism neglecting or even harming sentient beings while trying to protect non-sentient things
- The full richness of sentient experience. Not just pleasure and pain – but aethetics, awe, wonder, connectedness and love
- The importance of setting a philosophical baseline of moral consideration for all sentients. But how even that baseline is the product of deep philosophical thinking by intellectual giants (e.g. Bentham)
- Why most of the 8 billion people on the planet disagree with Sentientism
- The importance of ensuring that our confidence in naturalism doesn’t lead to our own dogma or closed-mindedness or arrogance
- The importance of humility and receptiveness and open-mindedness and constructive conversation
- Compassion even for people you disagree with
- Basing our ethics on a naturalistic understanding of sentience and sentient beings
- How to get to a Sentientist future. Facts and logic won’t be enough… our emotional reactions come first, philosophy follows
- Empathy as a way to engage people emotionally
- Helping people be more ready change by setting a good, “normal” example
- Making better ethics the easier choice
- Once people have taken easier, better ethical choices they might upgrade their ethics
- Freedom of belief, but not freedom to use those beliefs to harm
- When you see something as more important than suffering and death, you tend to get quite a lot of suffering and death
- Law is there to restrict freedom to protect others
- We already grant rights to corporations and rivers, why not extend them to non-human animals?
- How the law and rights fields can help drive positive change.
John at QMUL. @JohnAdenitire. sentientism.info. FBook.
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