Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.

Ashley is Director of Outreach for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). She has led a broad range of PETA’s campaigns and has been interviewed about her work to promote animal rights by the LA Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and in many other publications.

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 audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

We discuss:

00:00 Welcome
01:33 Ashley Intro

• 16 years at #PETA: public campaigns, celebrities… "enjoying every minute of it"

03:18 What Matters

• #ChristianScience "there was never a divide… this is science & this is god… a lot of spirituality"
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science (see risks re: prayer vs. medicine)
• Father "a non-practising Catholic… not a religious person but was very supportive of… that part of my mother's life"
• Personal relationship with god "connect directly with this spiritual part of your life"
• More a spiritual, all-pervasive god than a "judgemental, human figure"
• Rejecting "we judge everything based on a human worldview"
• Universally accessible rather than in/out-group based
• "Not telling you what to do"
• Religious vs. scientific views of reality "It never occurred to me that those things could be incompatible"
• Spiritual rather than literal interpretation of the #bible
• "#spiritually I really still do identify with these ideas & these values"
• "Macro spiritual concepts of love… that bring us out of what's right in front of us"
• "Isn't so much of science trying to go bigger & deeper"
• Science that we don't yet understand that can sometimes be anticipated by mystical/spiritual thinking
• Ontological (what's real?) & epistemological (how should we work it out?) naturalism
• Risks of wishful thinking
• #faith vs. #naturalism "I'm the latter… the evidence"
• Is there evidence that would lead you to reject Christian Science? "it's more of a spiritual practice"
• "#spirituality … it is a scientific pursuit… our ideas of science are too limited"
• Risks of dogma / harmful & discriminatory ethics in religious/supernatural worldviews
• "If you have an ethical question about the world you should be going back & working it out with these spiritual tools"
• Growing up in #losangeles
• One 8th grade term in a Southern #Baptist school "pamphlets in the office that told you why every other religion in the world was wrong & sinful - mine was in there"
• "You're going to hell!"
• "I was constantly being told 'be quiet, sit down, stop asking questions'… I remember the word 'obey' was used a lot"… "I didn't get it… why can't you answer these questions?"
• The #trauma caused by religious beliefs (e.g. threat of hell)
• Secularism & kids learning about multilple worldviews

41:08 What Matters?

• "My parents really laid the foundation… for my sense of ethics… each coming from their own respective backgrounds… two extremely ethical, thoughtful, kind, intelligent people."
• You don't need an old book to be a good person… universal goods
• "Goodness is something more primal than that [#divinecommandtheory]"

45:30 Who Matters?

• "I grew up in an animal loving household… unquestionably family members"
• The family dog: "She loved me and I loved her"
• "There was never any idea that these weren't individuals"
• At a few years old "why is this called chicken… if the animals are called chicken?"… "There was this pause… like when someone at school said 'Santa Claus isn't real?'"
• Mum had once been #vegetarian. Dad was "red meat & potatoes"
• "When they told me that meat was made of animals I was not happy"
• Thinking as a teen, but then drifting back to the social default
• Imagining humane farms & "there must be something different about these animals that we're eating"
• "We [good people] wouldn't be doing this if chickens felt pain… if it was cruel & violent & wrong"
• Asking a Sunday school teacher about "Thou shalt not kill" vs. eating animals… "take that back… & address it spiritually… figure it out… so I did."
• Seeing horrific footage in "Faces of Death" that "changed my entire life on the spot"
• "I knew that the footage of animals was real because I knew that they didn't need to fake that"
• "The worst thing I had ever seen… the level of devastation"
• Cultural differences re: #dogmeat vs. other animals
• “There’s no scientific reason why it’s wrong to eat a dog but OK to eat a chicken – it’s entirely cultural”
• “I can’t accept that this is OK… I guess that means it’s not OK to kill & eat any of these animals… & that’s when it stopped”
• “What we do to animals… it’s horrifying”
• Mum gave Ashley “Diet For a New America” book
• Learning about eggs, dairy & wider animal exploitation: “Dammit… I’m going to have to go vegan”
• “The punk scene was integral to educating me about these things.” Vegan bands and animal advocacy zines
• Previous guests: Nick Pendergrast (not Paul – sorry!), Kristof Dhont
• “In the punk community it was absolutely supported”
• Rebelling against classic teenage forms of “rebellion”
• “Our default should be that everyone matters… to care & to respect”
• Sentience vs. intelligence
• “Sentience should help us guide how we can do the least amount of harm”
• “A rock & a pig are very different”
• Destroying nature – “you’re in an ecosystem that does impact sentient beings”
• “There’s this impulse… ‘what can we not care about?’ Shouldn’t the default be the other way?”

01:16:33 How Can We Make A Better Future?

• “The whole of my work is dedicated to that [making a better world]”
• “Just caring more… and acting on it… not ‘what’s the most I can get away with?’”
• We’re not living on a desert island with a chicken… “we’re living in this modern world where we just have an abundance of choices”
• The power of improving human worldviews
• Win-wins
• Changing minds & institutions
• Many kinds of activism “what brings one person around is not the same as what will bring another person around… PETA is a great example of this”
• Changing legislation, corporations, cultural change, habits, ideas, thoughts “how people think about animals”
• “How do you change cultural thought?”
• Demonstrations that “people cannot walk past”, making headlines, “reaching people where they are”, social media, whistleblowers, veganism, lobbying
• “You can’t give problems without solutions… here’s the problem & here’s the action”
• Corporate vegan options
• Previous guest Ingrid Newkirk (PETA founder & president)
• Criticisms of PETA: corporatisation of philanthropy (vs. grass roots), feminist critiques, shock tactics
• “I am absolutely a feminist… Riot Girl is how I entered the punk scene” after experiencing the sexism of the Southern Baptist school
• “Respecting people’s autonomy… decisions about their bodies & their lives… something humans constantly deny animals”
• “If I choose to take part in a protest… with my clothes off… that’s entirely my decision… I’m standing up for animals.”
• “bodily putting myself out there for animals who have no choices about their bodies”
• “It’s interesting how often the media will take a photo of that protest & cut out the men… & what people choose to share on social media”
• Animal exploitation industries are marketing to people in this way “it’s very subversive that we take this imagery & we use it to unmarket – to tear down this facade”
• “Now that we have your attention we are going to debunk”
• “Meeting people where they are and making use of things that people already respond to – that is what some people need”
• Dress Vegan: People think that veganism is a diet “so it’s interesting to talk about something that clearly isn’t food”
• “There is a demand for vegan fashion”… vegan leather shoes, down alternative jackets
• Smaller brands often have some ethical motivation. The big brands “aren’t doing it to be nice… there’s a demand”
• “Individual choices do matter… it’s happening because people demanded it, asked for it, bought it, supported it… I think it’s empowering to think about that”
• “If you’re funding a terrible system unnecessarily, then stop!”
• Arguments from futility, ineffectiveness
• “The system wants you to believe you’re powerless… Put more stock in your ability to make a difference”
• “You just dive in – you get your hands dirty”
• “It’s almost as if people don’t realise they have the agency to act!… they’re almost waiting for someone to give them permission”
• Helping free ranging animals in New York
• “You’re allowed… you don’t need anyone to give you permission to do the right thing”
• JW: “If everybody sits at home waiting for collective action & systemic change to solve the problem – there isn’t going to be any collective action or systemic change”
• “The solution is – you act!”

01:44:00 Following Ashley:

• PETA.org resources: “if it’s not on the website you can email and you will get a response”
• @ashlovesmongo on Twitter & Instagram

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info.

Join our “I’m a Sentientist” wall using this simple form.

Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on Facebook.

Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon.

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.

Jay is an award winning filmmaker, writer, and podcaster. He directed Islam and the Future of Tolerance, a film based around a conversation between Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz. He produces and creates a wide range of content, writes on his “What Jay Thinks” blog & hosts the Dilemma podcast (some co-hosted with Coleman Hughes). I had the pleasure of being his guest for a Dilemma Hangout on Sentientism back in 2020.

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 audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

We discuss:

00:00 Welcome
01:54 Jay Intro

• The Essential #samharris series
• Documentary & narrative film-making
• "I really want to understand ideas… and transmit those to an audience… even if I totally disagree with the idea"

03:16 What's Real?

• Growing up in a secular #Jewish household
• "Post-holocaust American judaism is it's own brand… a very ethical & political tribe more than a religious one"
• "'Never again' becomes the holiest prayer"
• Psychologist dad, guidance counsellor mum
• "I'm a boring naturalist but… I love analogies for what it feels like to exist"
• Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five "Oh… This is what I like"
• An over-active imagination as a kid… "my scientists", The Truman Show, solipsism, Philip K Dick & #scifi
• #Meditation, #psychedelics, religious experiences… "scrambles the dials"
• Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality"
• How evolution shapes our construction of experiences of reality
• Psychedelics help us "catch it in the act" of reality construction
• "There's much more out there" e.g. non-human sentient experiences
• "It reminds you of the expansiveness of reality rather than show you a new one"
• The National High School Ethics Bowl
• Anil Seth's "How your brain hallucinates reality" @TED
• Annaka Harris's exploration of consciousness theories re: "The Hard Question"
• "Reality is awesome enough - who needs magic" (I mis-spoke!)
• Epistemological tests?: atheism, veganism, spherical earth…
• Writing about Sam Harris, not for him
• Object-oriented ontology
• #psychology "I don't think we're the rational animal… we're the rationalising animal"
• How people respond to #cognitivedissonance (Leon Festinger) "they really don't like it"
• Criticising #consequentialism "you can justify anything… wait long enough and the consequences will work out… where do you stop the clock… too easy to find an out"
• #Virtueethics "Secular virtue" (vs. religious views of virtue)
• What happens after noticing the cognitive dissonance. More about psychology & values more than epistemology?
• Coping mechanisms. Consequentialism, capitalism, economics… give people outs to "quiet these voices in their heads"
• Neil Levy "people are more rational than you think"
• Qanon, Goop products… everyone selects evidence/sources to suit themselves
• Believing unfounded things can be a "rational" response to existential crises / the discomfort of cognitive dissonance

37:45 What Matters?

• "There is no grounding (to ethics)"
• David Hume's "unbreachable" is-ought chasm
• "If you hate Sam (Harris) I think you'll like a lot of what I do there" (the Foundations of Morality episode of The Essential Sam Harris
• There is a relationship between is and ought but "It's up to us to define that relationship"
• "My bridge": Carl Sagan's "We are a way for the universe to know itself"
• "I'm super humanistic… I bristle at the efforts… to downgrade the human as just another animal"
• We have the "moral opportunity" to figure things out & decide what we ought to do
• "Luckily there's a lot of joy & fun in figuring it out… and some sadness… it's the only game in town… so I'm playing"
• "I'm trying to champion the human" & David Deutsch re: creation of explanations/knowledge
• "Experience must be the only way to see the bridge across is-ought"
• Moral agency & patiency
• Compassion as a moral opportunity
• Cultivated meat: Is there a risk of easy solutions that don't require humans to be better? Would we be missing a moral opportunity? What future horrors might we create?
• A future where everyone is #vegan so "we don't even need the word any more"
• The value of sacrifice?

58:50 Who Matters?

• “I went vegan finally when I fell in love with someone who was a vegan – and now she’s my wife”
• “I know what it feels like to agree with the arguments about animal suffering… I can remember what it feels like… to participate in a system that I now think is incredibly evil and harmful… and it feels like nothing… the banality of evil… but cognitive dissonance sucks.”
• The “I’m waiting for clean meat” and “I die if I eat vegan” / “I have no choice” responses (e.g. Sam Harris, Paul Bloom) and “it’s normal”
• The hope in realising people still feel cognitive dissonance
• Consistency & coherence… eating dogs and babies?
• How responding to cognitive dissonance can warp ethics (“they don’t matter”) and epistemology (believing things that are wrong)
• “My wife is the person who saw a video and was like ‘I can’t participate any more this is too horrible’ and changed her behaviour”
• “Most people are more like me – it’s hard for us – we just don’t face it”
• “I was living the [meat] paradox – but I do remember it felt like nothing”
• “The arguments themselves don’t carry the day”… humility
• Falling in love, going vegan, falling in love with cooking
• “My veganism was easier than hers – 15 years earlier”
• Anthropocentrism, sentiocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism
• The social norm determinants of how humans morally evaluate different non-humans (e.g. horrified at eating dogs but OK with eating pigs) “I must have been one of those people!”
• Jared Piazza, Brock Bastian, Rob Percival re: “The Meat Paradox” and Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”
• Jay’s experience of his dad’s death: “you don’t have to wait ‘til they die – it was a missed opportunity… don’t wait!”
• Moral opportunities… finding “better ways to live”
• “[non-human] animals don’t tend to struggle with cognitive dissonance”
• The naturalistic fallacy and the “necessary” argument… “A failure to embrace the transcendent nature of human knowledge creation… to question who we are… to engineer ourselves away from, if we want to, evolution.”
• Jay’s “Two Burgers on a Plate” article
• Sentientism’s ethical pluralism (deontology, utility, feminist care, virtue…)
• Philosophy of mind
• Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”
• Solipsism
• “With your definition of Sentientism – sign me up”
• Dan Dennett
• Integrated Information Theory IIT Tononi et al
• Imagining a consciousness/sentience detector “would people still eat lamb?”
• Can non-human animals do art? Second order thinking “most people would not want to eat that animal”
• “I don’t think animals are on the same level… I don’t think a lion… is wondering if it should be going plant-based”
• Carol Gigliotti’s “The Creative Lives of Animals”… play, love
• Frans de Waal & animals’ complex inner lives
• “I’m actually optimistic”

01:50:49 How Can We Make A Better Future?

• The Direct Action Everywhere right to rescue cases: if rescuing a dog from a hot car is illegal – so should rescuing animals from farms
• Rescuing Lily and Lizzie from Smithfield farms in Utah and being charged with felony burglary – then being acquitted https://righttorescue.com/
• Jay’s film project about the case & visiting Lily & Lizzie in a sanctuary
• Luna makes an appearance
• “given the choice humans don’t want to really do this”
• Imagining streaming live camera footage from slaughterhouses “My optimism is… it still bothers people”
• “We all know veganism is getting easier… the argument of necessity will be absurd”
• The flawed argument that “In the global capitalist consequentialist socioeconomic system… the greater good always works out…”
• Filming DxE protesting a rodeo… “people were upset… there’s some optimism in the anger… kids were just curious”
• Jay’s wife “it’s wrong – why don’t they just stop?”… “Most people have trouble just stopping”
• Sentientism puts intra-human and intra-species ethics “all on the same page”
• Religion and politics re: intra-human ethics. Re: non-human ethics it’s more culture?
• “I want to reinvigorate faith in the human capacity for love and compassion and for change”
• There’s a mismatch between “a better future” (consequentialism?) and “a good individual life” (virtue?) today. 8 billion people can’t live the way that’s currently thought of
• “We want to think of ourselves as good people… and doing something worthwhile” – integrity
• “Easy” tech fixes: horseless carts and cultivated meat
• Personal choices, political campaigns, donating to causes, influencing others, inventing new products, changing the market
• “Go try to watch an animal cruelty video and see if it bothers you… take an evidence-based approach… ask yourself and wonder… is that integrity?”
• An examined life. We have the capacity to address our cognitive dissonance
• “Catch yourself in the act…” of reacting to cognitive dissonance “taking the exit”
• If you wait for the easy tech fix you’ve missed a moral opportunity “We all face the opportunities that come along”
• “Believe me, Sam, you can be healthy”
• “You realise how fun it can be and how lovely it is to feel the integrity grow in yourself… and you can probably do others… that’s human”
• “Or fall in love with a vegan” 😊

Following Jay:

• Leaving social media (as has Sam Harris – same deal)
• The Essential Sam Harris series
• whatjaythinks.com

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info.

Join our “I’m a Sentientist” wall using this simple form.

Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on Facebook.

Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon.

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast.

Dhruv is a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge. He has interests in psychology, philosophy and animal advocacy.

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 audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

We discuss:

00:00 Welcome
01:33 Dhruv Intro
02:25 What's Real?

• Born in India, moving to Scotland "A mix of two cultures"
• Hindu temple at home, outside was "classic western materialism, science…"
• @OfficialDerrenBrown 's "Tricks of the Mind". Magic, charlatanism, #homeopathy , #religion, #GMO scepticism (e.g. Golden Rice)
• Reading Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things" at 12 yrs old
• Finding school academically easy but socially hard "immigrant children willl know… feeling like half and half and the halves don't really mix"
• Culturally universal values: "There was this value of transcendence that was just missing… it would be really nice if god was real… I switched back and forth"
• Celebrating #diwali when visiting India "I could see the appeal… but I couldn't see any reason or logic"
• "It's not like the western materialists have any really great answers on how to live…"
• Experiencing clinical #depression at Cambridge University
• Discovering #stoicism & #nietzsche "a very positive nihilism"
• The @philosophizethispodcast and @theschooloflifetv "self-directed, exploratory learning"
• Existentialism "I couldn't really follow the continental philosophers". Camus' "The Plague" made more sense during #covid19
• A personal situation "which just did not seem amenable to being logiced out of"
• A talk by @akalamusic
• Going back to Indian religion & philosophy "there might be something here"
• Reading the #mahabharata to understand the context for the #bhagavadgita
• #arjuna , #krishna roles & responsibilities "why should I act if the fruits of my acts are not my own?"
• Encountering #buddhism Graham Priest's "Paraconsistent logics"
• 2 weeks at a Buddhist monastery in Scotland "everyone had their own story… so much suffering… worse than mine"
• Values of patience, generosity, loving
• Practising #meditation & #mindfulness
• "Let me just try things that seem to work"
• The wisdom of hunter-gatherer cultures
• Not dismissing or reifying any culture
• "I accidentally moved to New Zealand"
• Going #vegan (after growing up #vegetarian ) mainly for environmental reasons
• Trying vegan pizza "this is fine"
• @SimonAmstellNumb 's #Carnage documentary
• @ed.winters Watching #EarthlingEd
• Ethical & epistemological journeys developing in parallel
• Meeting an activist community
• Reading Peter Singer's "The Life You Can Save" and #effectivealtruism
• Sam Harris' "Waking Up"
• Identity & Derek Parfit
• Physicist Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time" & intepretations of quantum physics
• "I have 4 extremely diverse points of view pointing to this very strange thing about notions of identity… the Buddha takes things one step further… this is one of the reasons you're upset"
• "Being troubled by open metaphysical questions is not because you don't have an answer… it's because you expect the answer"
• A local #yoga group
• "I stopped being bothered by these big existential questions"
• Exploring from the outside & the inside (e.g. via meditation)
• Cravings & suffering
• Philosophy of mind: functionalism, materialism, #illusionism , #panpsychism
• #dualism & non-dualism
• Are fictional characters "real"?
• Time as an abstraction of a gradient of #entropy
• The movie "Tenet"
• Consciousness as a statistical macro-phenomena?
• P-zombies
• #bayesian epistemology vs. Deutschian / Popper #CriticalRationality: putting reasons & explanation at the foundational level
• St. Petersburg Paradox

53:00 Who & What Matters?

• Inconsistency arguments re: moral exclusion
• "Consistency seems like a good thing to aim for"
• "Clearly animals count"
• Kinship & transcendence "they are literally related"
• "I use sentience… a fuzzy line"
• Artificial or alien sentience
• Plant sentience?
• Blamelessness if we're making good faith efforts to attribute sentience
• Risks of ethical flattening if consciousness is all-pervasive "everything matters so nothing does"
• Buddhism's "ultimate reality & relative reality"
• Pain vs. suffering & human capacity to mitigate suffering even when experiencing pain

01:03:03 A Better Future?

• Criticisms of #effectivealtruism
• Welfarism vs. abolitionism… end goals and tactics
• #Greenwashing & #Humanewashing
• Jeff Sebo and the psychological intuition re: rights
• Motivated reasoning
• Ex-vegans: “something leads them to eat some animal products and then their moral opinions change… that seems suspicious”
• Not just ending animal exploitation but preventing it re-emerging
• The wild animal suffering imperative
• Welfarism is “unnecessary… and risky”
• Logic of the larder, the myth of death without suffering, the intrinsic wrongness of killing?
• “I believe in person-affecting views but I don’t believe in persons”
• Individuals as “macro-phenomena”
• Is existence better than non-existence?
• “In the EA animal advocacy community it seems like people have said yes to welfarist approaches and no to abolitionist approaches (as tactics) – my conjecture is that… it should be ‘unknown’ to abolitionist approaches rather than ‘no’”
• The limitations of welfarist tactics: high income countries focus (now changing); cultivated-meat optimism (also changing); over-scepticism about individual change advocacy (esp. elimination / veganism)
• Reducetarianism: “More people will respond to the ‘reduce’ but they’ll do it by less – whereas fewer people will respond to the ‘eliminate’ but they’ll do it by more”
• Outdated unfortunate caricatures of abolitionists
• Risk of excuses & dead ends: reduction, “humane” animal farming…
• Ideas for effective abolitionism: international rights based approaches to animal law (a Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights?); animal farm transitions;
• “At some point all the pieces need to come together”
• #transfarmation “one of my favourite ideas… often farmers are trapped in this industry” “There’s a win-win situation for everyone involved”
• Economically self-sustaining interventions
• Institutional land-holdings re: agriculture
• Measuring human welfare via QUALYs and DALYs “well-intentioned but empirically and philosophically terrible”
• Objective list theory
• Biases re: loss and getting used to good or bad changes e.g. returning to hedonic set-points
• A better approach: “I could ask you”
• Happier Lives Institute “how bad is death and who is it bad for?”
• Could helping people cope with suffering be an excuse for not fixing the problems (e.g. poverty, health) causing their suffering?
• Trauma, stress and growth
• Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics “Economies that are required to grow regardless of whether or not they make people thrive… we should be aiming for economies that make people thrive whether or not they grow”
• The risks of environmentalism and degrowth movements “I’m comfortable, now everyone else needs to stop growing and find a different way to be happy”
• Working with communities
• Low-cost group therapy as an intervention can be highly cost effective “That’s a very surprising result… so illuminating… something that only the Effective Altruism movement could have produced”
• The wellbeing and economic arguments for helping people suffering from depression “great if you care about the people but also great if you just care about the money”
• Population life satisfaction as an indicator of whether a politician will get re-elected
• Psychedelics and meditation “the science really needs to catch up” “clinicians will need to be able to take an ontologically neutral point of view” (re: seeing fairies, for examples)
• Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium
• “I had no idea if that was working… but it did make me feel better”
• “You need a really finely tuned bullshit detector”
• The Aurelius Foundation, stoicism and previous guest Massimo Pigliucci

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info.

Join our “I’m a Sentientist” wall using this simple form.

Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on Facebook.

Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon.