65: ”When I adopted a dog - my whole worldview shifted” - Aditya from Animal Ethics - Sentientist Conversation

Aditya is the wild animal suffering outreach coordinator for Animal Ethics in India. He works in grass-roots animal activism with a variety of organisations. He is studying Animal Protection Law at the National Legal Studies Research Institute in India.

In 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 here on YouTube.

We discuss:

0:00 Welcome

1:22 Aditya's Intro - Animal Advocacy in India

2:10 What's Real? From Hinduism to naturalism

- Growing up Hindu and vegetarian

- Vedanta. Dualistic theism. Dharma

- Exploring other forms of spirituality after getting into animal advocacy

- Veganism clashed with the culture (e.g. dairy)

- Buddhism

- Jiddu Krishnamurti, embracing naturalism and rationalism.

5:00 What Matters Morally?

- The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would want to be treated

- Learning about sentience, suffering & harm

- "I used to just consider humans... but when I adopted a dog (Gini!) my whole worldview shifted"

- Ahimsa as a theme in many worldviews, but most vegetarians in India don't have a strong connection with farmed animal suffering

- Sentience as central - the capacity to feel pain or pleasure

- Singer's Animal Liberation

- Sharing a stress reaction with Gini to fireworks

- "When you realise that all you've been taught through your life is wrong"

- Speciesism & arbitrary discrimination

- Going vegan. Practically easy but some social challenges

- Bio, ecocentrism, holism

- Nature as sacred in some traditions

- "We need to focus on sentient beings not abstract entities"

- "Who is being harmed?"

- Don't harm sentient beings to protect non-sentient things

- A lack of relationship doesn't justify moral exclusion

- Even simpler sentients might suffer just as much

- It's not just avoiding harming, its an obligation to help

- It doesn't matter whether the cause of harm is human or not

19:00 Wild animal suffering

- We need to correct the belief that "if humans leave nature alone nature will be perfect". Nature is not idyllic

- High offspring r-strategies drive massive suffering & death

26:15 The Future - dystopias & utopias

- The risk of creating new dystopias (e.g. insect farming, colonising other planets with more farmed/wild sentient suffering, artificial sentients)

- Ending speciesism & granting moral consideration to all sentients

- Technology is a double-edged sword

- We need moral as well as tech innovation

- Fixing current problems & avoiding creating new ones

30:26 Which entities are sentient?

- Sentience as a biologically evolved class of information processing

- Updating our assessment of sentience using science

- Is centralisation of structures required?

...and much more. Full show notes on YouTube and Sentientism.info.

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Thanks Graham for the post-prod.