"We need to imagine a different world" - Emilia Leese - author and host of Think Like a Vegan - Sentientism 198
Emilia is co-author of the book Think Like A Vegan and host of the Think Like a Vegan podcast. She is involved in the Birchfield Highlands re-wilding project in Scotland, edits the quarterly magazine for The Heath & Hampstead Society in London and has developed life skills and ethics workshops for underserved youth. Professionally, she has been a corporate finance lawyer for over 20 years.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube. 00:00 Clips!
01:25 Welcome
- Shared Sentientism guests with @thinklikeavegan :
04:41 Emilia's Intro
- Corporate finance, vegan writing / podcasting, rewilding in Scotland, magazine editing
05:45 What's Real?
- Growing up in Italy
- #catholic school "which I hated... it never made sense to me that only some people... would go to heaven"
- Letting teachers know at 5-6 years old "this doesn't make any sense"... "they kind of stopped asking me questions"
- Dad is an Indian philosophy professor
- Investigating eastern and western traditions and religions "I said 'none of it matters'... it matters what I do here and now"
- "People have their traditions and I love that...but for me ultimately I don't need to have any of that"
- "The fundamental of all of them is love... just practice it"
- "That love then turns in to a respect and a valuing... of sentient life... and everything that's around us"
- "Plants & funghi... even minerals and mountains... they may not feel anything but that doesn't matter... it's all connected"
- "The fate of the least among us... is extremely important"
- "Bees and insects... how they go, we go"
- "I don't need an outside force to tell me to do the right thing"
- "A certain basic fairness... treat everyone the same unless there's a morally relevant reason to treat them differently"
- "I have personally witnessed things that I cannot explain... there's lots of things I don't know... so I've decided that's fine"
- "You have to leave space for changing your mind... we learn everything!"
- JW: How broken epistemology can lead "good" people to do terrible things
- The ethical and epistemological errors that justify animal agriculture
- Maneesha Deckha's "beingness" concept
- "We as advocates have to be better at our own rhetoric"
- "We live in a capitalist, non-vegan world... so there will be inherent things that you are not going to be able to solve"
- "You don't need to be well versed in philosophy... we can all get there"
- Examining what's driving our actions... fear (of others, change, deistic reprisal, social norms, admitting we were wrong)
- JW: Uncommon common sense re: ethical and epistemic basics
- Humans building convenient hierarchies "as long as you're at the top"
- "Animal agribusiness has never been nice... 10,000 years ago... 5,000 years ago... there's always objectification, exploitation and death... that doesn't change"
- "To the being - you only have one life" 26:20 What Matters?
53:13 Who Matters?
01:00:42 A Better World?
01:22:00 Follow Emilia
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