[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. 

[00:00:16] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Our guest today is Jamie Woodhouse, host of the Sentientism Podcast and YouTube channel, and a frequent lecturer in schools across the United Kingdom. Welcome, Jamie. 

[00:00:28] Jamie W: It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m a long-term listener of Ethical Schools, so it’s an honor to be your guest.

[00:00:33] Jon M: We’re honored to have you. What is sentientism?

[00:00:35] Jamie W: It’s a worldview. And people will be more or less familiar with different sorts of worldviews. There are religious worldviews: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism. There are some non-religious worldviews, like humanism, for example. So sentientism is another option, if you like. And like a lot of those other worldviews, it’s trying to answer some of the really deep and I think the most important philosophical questions, questions like how can we know what’s real and what’s true? And just as importantly, questions of ethics: Who matters and why do they matter? So sentientism is a worldview, but I summarize its answer to those big questions in one sentence, which is: Evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings. Sentientism answers the “how should we know” question by saying that we should take a broadly naturalistic approach that uses evidence about reality; uses reasoning, with a healthy dose of humility, because we know our reasoning is always flawed, to try and understand reality as well as we can, knowing that job is never finished, knowing that we should always be open to new evidence and better reasoning. And the ethical question, it answers, the clue is in the name; with this idea of sentience, which is just the capacity to have experiences or feelings; so a sentient being is any being that can feel or experience pain, joy, happiness, love, anything at all really. And sentientism says we should have compassion for every sentient being, and we should have moral consideration for them. At the very least, we should try not to needlessly harm, exploit, or kill them. So that’s pretty much it. Yeah, evidence, reason, and compassion. But the compassion is for all sentient beings, hence the name. 

[00:02:09] Amy H-L: Could you tell us something about the history of sentientism? Where did the concept originate? 

[00:02:13] Jamie W: The word is reasonably new. It’s only been around since the 1970s, but these ideas are ancient and they have a very diverse range of global roots. And I’ll see how far back into history I can push you here. The ideas of this sort of naturalistic epistemology, using evidence and reason, I think have been around for as long as humanity, because I think even early humans were using their senses, looking around their environment and trying to understand it honestly so that they could survive and prosper and reproduce. So those basic ideas of just using information about reality and thinking honestly about it to try and understand things, I think, are as old as humanity. But you could push that even further and say, you know, maybe these ideas are even pre-human because non-human animals for hundreds of millions of years have been using their senses to gather evidence of the world and have been at least doing some sort of rudimentary reasoning. They’re not writing books or doing podcasts, but they are doing reasoning to build models of the world to understand it and to exist. So, again, this sort of naturalistic epistemology has ancient and deep roots and through different human cultures, you can see those patterns as well. Different parts of Eastern thinking, African thinking, ancient Greek thinking, you’ll find some interesting people who are saying, look, I’m not going to use maybe a faith-based approach. I’m not going to use the dogmatic approach. I’m not going to use the approach that’s based on revelation or authorities from the past. I’m going to reason based on the evidence I have to hand about reality. You can see those things in all sorts of different cultures and that ripples through to the present day.

But the other side of sentientism, the ethical side, also has really ancient deep roots. So the basic idea of compassion, for example, goes back a long, long way again to the roots of humanity and even beyond. Because again, I’d argue that non-human animals today and for hundreds of millions of years before we were around, you know, many mothers would care about their offspring and vice versa.

Many non-human animals and, hopefully, human animals care about the group members. So that raw idea of compassion is something that has an ancient evolutionary basis. But then this idea about not just caring about those in your kin or around you, but caring much more expansively, again, ripples through a bunch of different cultures. Many people will have heard of the term ahimsa, for example; it’s very familiar to the Dharmic religions. And in simple terms, that’s a philosophy of non-violence or do-no-harm. And the idea there is not just do-no-harm to humans. It’s do-no-harm to any being that can be harmed. And a being that can be harmed is a sentient being, a being that can feel the harm you’re doing to it. Those ideas both have a sort of naturalistic way of understanding the world and a really broad compassion for all beings that are sentient, deep and ancient roots. But then this word is quite a new way of bringing those two things together and saying, let’s use both of those things together, a naturalistic epistemology and a sentiocentric compassion, if you like.

And I can tell you a little bit more about history of the word if that’s useful, but that’s more the history of the ideas.

[00:05:11] Jon M: Do we know for sure who or what is sentient?

[00:05:14] Jamie W: Well, I would argue one of the important things about this naturalistic commitment, this using evidence and reason approach, is that in a way you’re never 100 percent sure of anything. So you can take some formal systems like maths where you define the structure in such a way that you can be pretty sure in a particular type of math that 2 plus 2 equals 4, you know, that’s a level of certainty that’s enabled by the structure of that system. But when we’re thinking about the real world, I think a healthy naturalistic or scientific approach would say we’re never 100 percent sure about anything. That certainly applies to sentience. I think there is always going to be some degree of uncertainty about sentience. You know, I could say I’ve got a little bit of uncertainty about your and Amy’s sentience, but I’m very confident, I’m certainly confident enough to give you moral consideration. And the reason I guess I’m confident in your and Amy’s sentience can help with an idea about how we might ascribe it more broadly. So one, I can just engage with you. Your communications and your behavior indicate that you probably have an experience going on inside. You have a perspective. You have interest. You have your own model of the world. You might not, you might just be an automaton that’s been cleverly put together. But I think from your behavior and your communications, I can infer that there’s a sentient being behind the eyes I’m looking at on the Zoom call. 

I can also think about our common evolutionary history and say, well, we’re pretty much the same sorts of machines. Really. You know, we’re homo sapiens. If you look at our genes and our bodies and our brains, there’s a lot of evolutionary common history there. I’m pretty confident I’m sentient because if I pinch my hand, I can feel that. So I’m pretty confident because of our evolutionary past that you two probably are, too.

But you could also look at our information architecture. So you could put us under an fMRI scanner or some other similar sort of technology and see firings going on in our nervous systems and our brains that look pretty analogous when we’re undergoing similar experiences. So again if I know it hurts me when I pinch my hand and I can put you in an fMRI scanner and see very similar patterns going on.

Again, it’s not guaranteed, but these are at least three lines of inference that can indicate you guys are probably sentient. And we can use those similar lines of inference with non-human animals as well. And they’re the main type of non-human sentient beings that are around at the moment.

One alternative approach from those sorts of scientific lines of inference is you can just look into the eyes of a puppy like the one sitting at my feet and that will give you a very intuitive emotional sense that Luna down here is sentient. If I tread on a paw by mistake or if I feed her a chocolate drop we can get a very intuitive emotional sense of the sentence that’s there too.

So there are a bunch of different ways, but the short answer is there’s no 100 percent guarantee, but I’d argue there’s no 100 percent guarantee of any of our knowledge about the real world. 

[00:07:59] Jon M: What do you say to someone who thinks that plants are sentient? 

[00:08:02] Jamie W: I think we should be open-minded about it because this sentientism worldview doesn’t give us a list of types of things that are sentient. It doesn’t say artificial intelligence can be or can’t be. It doesn’t say certain types of animals can or can’t be. It doesn’t say plants can or can’t be. But it does say whenever we’re trying to work out what’s true, we should use evidence and reason in this broad naturalistic approach that should lead us to have probabilistic views. Instead of having a belief that is yes or no, we should have degrees of confidence that should line up with the strength of the evidence. Those views should also be provisional in that if the evidence changes, we should be willing to change our views. And when it comes to ethical stuff, we should probably be prudent as well and be, you know, a little bit cautious about what we’re doing so we don’t accidentally cause harm by mistake. So the approach I take with plants is so well, we should be open-minded. We should use those lines of inference and decent quality naturalistic and scientific thinking to work it out and come up with the answer. A more direct answer is really to summarize the modern scientific consensus about plant sentience. And that is pretty strongly that given what we know now, they’re very, very unlikely to be sentient. They seem to quite often have complex behaviors and the ability to even communicate amongst each other. But because of their information architecture, you know, the rigidity of plant cell walls, because of their evolutionary history, which tends to involve much more limited mobility, and choices that they need to make from animals and from their behavior and communications, it seems very unlikely they’re sentient. And part of the reason for that is, I think the evolutionary story about how sentience came to be is really helpful in understanding what sentience might be. And there are lots of different schools of thought, but my favoured one is that sentience probably emerged sometime in the Precambrian because there were very simple animals that for the first time started to exist in a more complicated landscape that they needed to navigate to survive. So very rudimentary, you know, light responses or nutrient responses developed into a rich sense of how am I doing now? How am I doing now, that proved really useful in evolutionary terms to basically take them towards good stuff and away from bad. And I think that was probably the root of sentience in the very simplest animals. And then that capability has expanded out and followed the animal family tree as rich as it is with all of the leaves of branches and twigs, and even includes the three of us sitting on the call today. So again, too long an answer, but the short answer is be open-minded. But at the moment, I think it’s very unlikely. 

[00:10:40] Amy H-L: Taking the timeline in the other direction, does the sentientism worldview take future generations of sentient beings into account?

[00:10:49] Jamie W: It does. It certainly leaves the door open for that. But one of the annoying things about sentientism is because it’s so basic, it just says evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings. It’s also very pluralistic. So it leaves the door open for all sorts of different beliefs and also lots of different ethical systems, as long as every sentient being counts. But I think in that framework, just as maybe a humanist approach would care about future humans who haven’t yet been born, you know, that’s part of the reason many of us care deeply about the climate crisis, a sentientist stance would do the same thing and would say, well, sentient beings that exist today clearly matter, but we should also bear in mind that if there are sentient beings that will exist in future generations, they will also have the capacity to suffer and feel joy and pleasure or whatever they feel. And that should matter to us too, at least in anticipation. Yeah. 

[00:11:37] Amy H-L: Does sentientism call on everyone to act in specific ways? Like, for example, should everyone be vegan? 

[00:11:47] Jamie W: So let me answer that question directly. I think yes, but let me explain the reason why. Because sentientism is what I call ethically pluralistic, right. So, it says, look, there’s all sorts of different ethical systems you might deploy and many of your listeners will be familiar with these from your podcast previously and just the whole concept of ethical education installing. So just some examples: there’s the idea of a feminist care ethic that focuses on our responsibilities for care for each other in a relational context because of the nature of the relations we have; there are virtue ethics that focus on what does it mean to be a good person; there are deontological ethics, which think about different types of rules that we should follow, maybe that can link to ideas about duty or rights-based ethics, for example; and there are consequentialist ethics, which worry about the consequences of things and say that we should judge our actions based on the result, including ideas like utilitarianism. So sentientism, again, is somewhat annoyingly pluralistic. It says, look, you can use all of those systems if you like, or a mix of them, but the only thing we insist on is that you grant serious moral consideration, you have compassion for every sentient being in that system. So if you want to follow a feminist care ethic, you have to recognize our responsibility for caring, at least in some minimal sense, for all sentient beings. If you’re a virtue ethicist and you want to think about the virtues of justice or kindness, we have to extend those concepts of justice and kindness to all sentient beings. If you want to be utilitarian, utilitarianism tends to do this automatically because it recognizes all well-being, and all suffering is salient. So if you want to be utilitarian, then the suffering and the well-being of every sentient being counts toward. So you can use any of those systems, but you have to include all of the sentient beings in the scope of moral consideration.

So the reason why I suggest that veganism is an implication of sentientism is that whichever one of those systems you use, I think there’s something common to all of them, which is that if you’re going to grant moral status or moral consideration to someone or have compassion for them, for those terms to mean anything at all, they have to mean at the minimum that we would commit not to needlessly harming, exploiting or killing that being. I would argue if you would needlessly harm someone, by definition, that means you don’t have compassion for them. So that, in a technical term, is called non-malefic, which is just I’ll try not to do bad stuff to you. It doesn’t say I would help you, or be benevolent, or I would have to be super demanding ethically and make sacrifices to go out of my way to help you. But at the very least, I wouldn’t needlessly harm or exploit you. And when you look at the definition of ethical veganism, many people think of it as, you know, a sort of purity thing where it’s like a binary switch where it’s on or off, but actually veganism is a philosophical stance that just commits to doing what we can as far as practical and possible to avoiding the exploitation, harming, and killing of sentient beings or animals. So in that sense, it almost becomes the same thing. Veganism itself isn’t demanding. Veganism doesn’t suggest you should go and help animals. It just says, says, you know, at the very least we should try our best as far as practical and possible to not harm them. So in a way, yeah, I think that if you have compassion for someone, almost by definition, that means you take the stance that says exploiting, killing, or harming them would be bad. And in a way, that’s all that veganism is. It’s just doing what we can to try and avoid causing those things for all sentient beings, which ties up pretty closely with the definition of animals.

[00:15:22] Jon M: I have, I guess, two parts of the same question. One is that many Indigenous people have traditions of hunting and killing animals for food, but tied in with that thanking the animal for giving its life in order that they can eat and being very conscious of the fact that there is a relationship and they are killing because they’re then going to eat the animal and then tied in with that, you have whole cultures, such as, for example, in the Philippines, where the major food is, is rice and fish. So I guess my question would be what would you say to people from either of these cultures when you’re explaining sentientism and how you would hope that it would impact their behavior? 

[00:16:08] Jamie W: Yeah, there’s so much to say there, but let me try and break it down into a few different perspectives. One is that a sentientist philosophy doesn’t say that we can’t ever harm or kill or exploit. There might be situations in which it’s ethically justified, but those have to be serious justifications. So just as someone who believes in human rights or has a humanist view would say, look, I care about all humans, but they can still imagine situations where it would be still ethically justifiable for a variety of reasons to harm or kill someone else, sentientism allows that space too. It says, look, it’s up to us to work that stuff through and there will be difficult ethical trade-offs, but every sentient being should count seriously in our moral consideration. So if there are situations where someone genuinely has little other option for survival or sustenance, then we will, in those circumstances, ethically allow harm or killing of non-human animals or human animals, for example. So that’s, that’s one thing. There is space for justification of harm. It’s not a you must never harm. It’s a you must never needlessly harm. So if there is a genuine need, and by a genuine need, I don’t mean I like bacon sandwiches. I mean, actual need, there’s space for that. And there’s space for that in ethical veganism too, because again, it’s about where practical and possible. It’s not a purity thing.

The second thing I would say is that I think many people, we should be careful here as well, because there are so many different cultures that we might describe as Indigenous. We can’t really summarize across them, but there are examples of different Indigenous cultures that, as you say, actually are quite close to sentientism in a sense. They’re closer than much of the Eurocentric cultures because they recognize sometimes, through ideas like animism, that there is a being that warrants some moral consideration, even in the animals they hunt. So there are I think, many people who have those types of worldviews who will already be quite open to a sentientist way of thinking and many of those conversations go on all the time and I’ve had some fascinating conversations with people who come from those types of cultures about the links between animism and sentientism. And I think the difference I’d draw is that we have to be careful as humans from whatever culture we come from that we don’t fall into patterns of self-justification for the things we’re doing. So when you talk to an American rancher, for example, they will quite often talk about their relationship with the cows on their ranch as being symbiotic, and they will express gratitude for the animals gratefully giving up their for us to have a nice steak. That’s what’s going on in the rancher’s mind to justify what they’re doing. It doesn’t genuinely with integrity reflect the cow or the steer. And that’s happening in all sorts of other cultures as well. We might say, you know, I’m thanking this animal for being hunted but the reality is, if we take the perspective of that animal, they don’t want to be harmed. They want to live a long, full, happy life with their family, and that’s what sentientism is saying, that rather than us projecting our views onto non-human animals or other humans, we should have a high-integrity, genuine attempt to really understand what the other, what their interests and their perspectives are, and try to act with that in mind, even if we end up justifying harming them. 

And then I guess the final thing I’d say is one about practicalities and implications and change and transition. And just as if I were here talking about humanism today, and sort of, we should grant universal human rights to everybody. And someone said, well, how are you going to solve world peace and make sure we solve world poverty and everyone is prosperous? I might say, well, That’s a great conversation, but it doesn’t undermine the idea that we should grant universal human rights to every human just because it might be difficult to put into practice. The same is absolutely true with sentientism. There are some parts of current human practices that might be quite easy to transition to something that’s much more compassionate. For example, taking industrial animal agriculture in the West and transitioning it to plant-based agricultural systems. Culturally, that might feel difficult. Socially it might feel difficult, but technically it’s trivially easy and we’ll have loads of other benefits as well, but then there are other cultures around the world, as you say, whether in Malaysia or fishing communities in South India or Indonesia, where the dynamics are very different because those communities are much more deeply embedded with industries that exploit or harm animals. They have fewer options and the transitions there are going to be more challenging and more difficult, but there are people within those communities who are already working on those types of ideas. And to be honest, often those cultures are more open to sentientist ideas than a classical Eurocentric Western culture is. I’m quite optimistic that both there are different transition paths for different cultures that may look very different, but in each of them, people within those communities are very open-minded about trying to make those moves and those shifts at different paces. Sorry, a long answer, but hopefully it sort of covers the basis. It’s a rich and complex topic. 

[00:21:00] Amy H-L: A very, very helpful answer. Thank you. So far we’ve spoken mainly about doing less harm, right? Would you say that the sentientism worldview calls for any kind of actively helping sentient beings to thrive?

[00:21:19] Jamie W: So the baseline it draws is more about trying to try not to harm. That’s the non-maleficence I talked about. Almost everyone I know who calls themselves a sentientist in our communities and our forums and who just likes the worldview and says, look, that describes me, nearly everybody, even if they do prioritize suffering and thinks, you know, suffering is worse than well-being is good, for example, which is a reasonably common view, the well-being and happiness and joy and the positive things about life absolutely matter. You know, they matter to those individuals and they matter to ultimately all sentient beings. So they see value in the positive. It’s not just avoiding the negative. And for many people that does lead to certain degrees of obligation to help others and people will prioritize that in different ways. They might execute that in different ways. Some people might be more expansive and global and multi-species. Some people will be more focused on their local community and the people around them. But, yeah, I think nearly everybody would layer on a positive, benevolent obligation on top of that minimal try not to harm baseline. But again, that’s a very active and difficult area of debate, i.e., how demanding should ethics be on us and how should we prioritize? Fine, we grant moral consideration to every sentient being, but, practically, you can’t do that exactly equally. We all have to prioritize and make difficult choices. How do we do that? There’s a whole world of discussions that still continues on top of this baseline that I’m suggesting we agree. 

[00:22:39] Jon M: Schools are starting to teach about climate change. What’s the relationship between sentientism and concern about climate change? 

[00:22:47] Jamie W: It’s a really rich relationship because if we have a concern for the 8 billion humans here, we care about climate change because of the impact on those 8 billion humans, right, the rising temperatures, the pollution, the wildfires, the whatever it is, right. If we extend our compassion out to all sentient beings, those currently under our control or those living in the wild, we’re probably talking about quintillions of sentient beings that are out there in the wild, all of whom are also impacted by the climate and environmental crises that are going on, too. So I would argue if we move from a human-centered approach to a sentientist approach, that just boosts our motivation by an enormous factor to really address some of these problems, and it also opens the door to some solutions, too. One of the beautiful things about extending our compassion further, just as it has been so far in our fight for human rights, is it’s good for people doing the extension. It’s not just an altruistic thing that’s good for the people we deign to grant more moral consideration to, right. It’s good for the people doing extending. It’s a collaborative thing, and that works really powerfully in the climate space, too, because quite often, the way we are deliberately exploiting non-human animals, particularly through animal agriculture and fishing, is one of the major causes of the climate crisis in the first place. So by transitioning that to, for example, a plant-based set of food and agricultural systems, not only do we avoid catastrophic ethical harms that frankly are needless but we also help ourselves selfishly in terms of mitigating the climate crisis. So whether you’re thinking about land and water or air pollution, when you’re thinking about land use and the links to vast swathes of deforestation and biodiversity loss, most of which is driven by animal agriculture. And when you think about the emissions generated from animal agriculture and fishing, whether it’s CH4 or CO2. Approximately a quarter of the emissions are generated just from agriculture and nearly all of that is from animal agriculture.

So there’s a big win- win there. But there’s an interesting wrinkle around the climate and the environment as well, in which many people will say, look, my concern for the climate isn’t just about humans. I care about the environment itself. You know, I care about the earth as Gaia. I care about ecosystems. I care about species and populations and habitats and rocks and rivers and trees. And maybe I think we should grant rights to nature, too. So they will say, look, Jamie, I’m going beyond sentientism here. I’m caring about be-, I’m caring about things and concepts and systems that, you know, aren’t sentient, you know, rocks, rivers, trees, and I don’t think the earth is sentient either, although some people will disagree with me on that. So in a way, that feels like an even more generous ethical stance, because you’re going even beyond the sentient beings the challenge I see is that quite often that stance really is just a veneer on a human-centered way of thinking, because I think what many people really want when they’re thinking about that big environment out there is really about a sort of human aesthetic preference for nature being pretty, or it comes back to the ecosystem services that us humans need that we want to live in.

You can see whether that’s true or not. You can see whether it’s a genuine ethical concern or whether it’s just a veneer on anthropocentrism based on whether those people who have a rich, broad environmental and ecocentric concern. That’s the sort of next level beyond sentientism, a sort of ecocentric view or a biocentric view. whether those people grant serious moral consideration to sentient beings. Because if they exclude farmed animals or wild animals from their consideration, but claim to care about rocks, rivers, trees, ecosystems, and the earth as Gaia, then again, I think something has gone wrong. We’ve started to care about things that can’t care whereas other sentient beings care about themselves, and that’s why we should care about them. And there’s a deep moral difference between kicking a rock and kicking in a puppy. And there’s a deep moral difference between cutting a carrot and cutting a pig. And the difference is, does that entity you’re affecting, do they care about what you’ve done? And if they care, we should care about them. That’s another way of getting into this sentience idea. So again, I’m sorry for rambling on, but hopefully that answers the question.

[00:27:02] Jon M: What would you like K-12 teachers to know about sentientism?

[00:27:07] Jamie W: So I’d love teachers to know about the worldview and understand that it’s these two simple things: when it comes down to epistemology, take a naturalistic approach on the evidence and reason side, and on the ethical side, it’s about sentiocentrism, compassion for all sentient beings. So I’d like them to know that, but in terms of both educational systems and curricula and how we handle things in the classroom, it’s quite interesting how this idea can play in because it’s such a broad worldview, in effect, how we know everything and it affects everything to do with ethics as well. I think you use these ideas through all sorts of different subjects. Why just teach human history? Why not teach the history of non-human animals and how we have lived with them and around them and how they’ve existed over time? When we’re thinking about geography, why should it just be natural world of earthquakes and volcanoes and rivers and oceans and then urban geography or social geography about humans? What about the geography of animal spaces and how and where they live when it comes to economics and politics? Why are we just thinking about human values and human democracy? Maybe there’s openness to ideas about shifting from a democracy to sentiocracy where other sentient beings could be represented in our political systems in various ways. So I think in almost every subject, you can think about broadening our ethical scope and saying, well, why just humans. 

But I think you can also play the epistemology end as well. That’s obviously a strong factor. Science is about biology and physics and using evidence and reason and experimentation inaudible] ideas, but often they’re skimmed over and there isn’t much discussion about, you know, there are different choices here. There are different sorts of ways of knowing and epistemologies. And this is why this naturalistic approach is so powerful and so useful. And I think it would be good to emphasize that and also to play that through into other forums as well. So if we’re thinking about teaching civics or other topics about citizenship, that idea about really good quality epistemology can feed through into how we help young people deal with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracism, how to apply critical thinking, media literacy, and work out which sources to trust. And so it runs through very deeply there. And when we’re teaching again about civics or citizenship or philosophy, or in the UK, we have subjects that are either religious education or religious and worldviews education. We can actually teach the worldview explicitly and say, look, here’s a way of approaching the world that some people ascribe to. You can set it alongside other alternatives like Buddhism and Christianity and Hinduism and humanism and compare and contrast and take a pluralistic approach to understanding the different worldviews.

So I think there are two things I’d love to see. One is just infuse the worldview into absolutely every aspect of educating people about different subjects, but also teach the worldview directly. And there might also be an influence on the pedagogy you take and the philosophy of education itself. Because I think a sentientist approach to education, because of our central compassion for the children in our schools, would prefer a child-centered empowering approach that isn’t just about, you know, cramming a curriculum into them so they can memorize it. It’s about enabling them to do what they want to do with their lives and their futures. 

[00:30:24] Amy H-L: Are children naturally compassionate or is compassion something that needs to be taught?

[00:30:30] Jamie W: Well, this is a fascinating topic, and I’ve been lucky on my own podcast to interview some psychologists who’ve studied exactly these questions, and they’ve gone through and done different surveys at different ages about how kids think about exactly these topics. And I don’t want to be too naive about young children. I don’t think we’re born as some sort of ethically or epistemologically perfect being and then we’re tainted by society, but there is something to that. So when I’m running workshops and classes in schools, and I will sometimes say, look, you know, this idea, the sentientism idea I described to you may seem a little strange, particularly if you’ve just been learning about five or six different religions. And now there’s this way of thinking. It’s very different from a religious way of thinking. But at the same time, it’s not that unfamiliar to you because if you’ve got younger brothers or sisters who are three or four years old, in a way they are operating in that sort of sentientist way, because they are with their limited capacities using evidence from their senses and looking around, they have a natural curiosity, they’re trying to understand the world and they are doing, you know, at least basic three or four-year-old reasoning about the world. They don’t yet understand it and haven’t been told things that aren’t true. They haven’t been told to believe things just because. They haven’t been told even if the evidence changes, don’t change your mind. You know, they start out with a basic level of curiosity that I think is a core of a sentientist way of thinking. And they also do have a deep intuitive compassion. So, of course, there are the examples of, you know, little boys out of curiosity, mostly, pulling the wings of flies. There are instances of children being cruel to each other and to non-human animals, but I think most young children do have that intuitive compassion. If their mother is upset, they will feel sad, too. And if you put a young child with a pig, they will care for it. They won’t want to harm it. And many children then really struggle because what happens from that starting point, again, I’m not saying it’s pure or perfect, but most kids start out curious and open-minded and willing to learn. And they start out generally with a broad compassion that already spans the species boundary. But then what happens in our education system, and I don’t mean just schools, I mean, culture, society, parents, other adults, is that one, most children around the world are then taught, frankly, a series of things, which are probably fabrications, they’re taught a series of things, which they are told to believe, even if the evidence contradicts them based on authority or dogma. And they’re also taught an epistemology, which is I’ve told you the facts. That is the end of the story. There is no point in doing further evidence and reasoning because we already have the answers, or some other form of epistemology about trusting an authority unquestioningly, even if the evidence contradicts it. So on that epistemological side, kids start out curious, and then we frankly often teach them dogma fabrications and beliefs that just aren’t true. 

And on the compassionate side, something similar happens where through a process of hiding the truth, obscuring the truth, we eventually come to enculturate kids into the view that it is completely ethically acceptable, maybe even desirable, to a catastrophic industrial scale, exploit, harm, and kill very obviously sentient beings because we like the taste of their bodies or their secretions and because culturally and traditionally, we’ve come to appreciate those sorts of foods. And quite often children have terrible moments of cognitive dissonance, which many parents will have experienced and school teachers will experience when they come to realize that the food on their plate is actually made from a sentient being that otherwise they would show compassion to.

So in a strange sense, while I’d love people to be taught a sentientist worldview, and I’d love that to be infused into the education curricula so that kids at least have the chance to adopt it, it’s almost as important that we try and step back from teaching them away from it in the first place and try to move away from harmful indoctrination in our education systems where we break kids’ ethics, we teach them to be less compassionate and to exclude other sentient beings, whether they’re human or not, from moral consideration. And we teach them a broken epistemology, which frankly in the modern world puts them in a very difficult position when they’re swimming in misinformation and disinformation. And if we brought kids up to believe unquestionably an authoritative source, and then we expect them to navigate today’s social media landscape, this is partly why we’re struggling, right, because we’ve taught them a terrible tool set to go into that world, when what they really need is something that is grounded in good quality evidence and reasoning, open-mindedness, and a rich, generous ethical scope that excludes nobody, no sentient being, from our moral consideration. So in a way, it’s as much about undoing the harmful stuff as it is about, you know, teaching a different way, I think. 

[00:35:09] Jon M: What kinds of questions do students ask you? Do the questions change a lot with the students’ age? 

[00:35:15] Jamie W: They do tend to change. I guess another way into that is to say, well, what are the questions I ask at different ages? And one of the brilliant things about talking about these ideas in schools is even the very youngest kids get this stuff more intuitively than most adults, because with many adults, when you talk about these ideas, you will lay the ideas out and they will already be thinking through the implications and using those implications as a reason to challenge and undermine and go what about this? What about that? Whereas kids, I think, are often more ready to ask the big questions and think about them in a fresh way. So even with four or five-year-olds, we talk about epistemology and ethics and all of these big words and sentientism and so on, but when you start a conversation with a group of four or five-year-olds, and you say, how do we work out what’s true, the conversation you can then have is mind-blowing and brilliant and fresh and exciting. You can go into all sorts of different directions. And then when you also ask them, whom should we care about and what should we care about. Again, these really simple, basic questions can go everywhere. But I should answer your question. The questions do change.

My experience in the UK is interesting because most of what I’ve done so far is in the context of a specific part of the curriculum, and that is about religious education or religious worldviews education. And in the UK, that space used to be quite concentrated on just teaching Christianity, and then it modernized a bit to say, okay, there are some other religions as well we can teach you about, and now it’s shifting more openly into thinking about using philosophy and worldviews, including non-religious worldviews, more sentientism and so on. It is fascinating. Quite often., it’s set in the context of a bunch of kids who’ve just been learning about a load of different religious worldviews. So some of the questions I get will reflect that. They’ll be saying, well, what are your rituals? What are your ceremonies? Who are your authority figures? Do you have a church? Do you have a building? And quite often, the answer is, well, no, this is just a worldview. This isn’t a religion at all. It’s just a way of thinking. So we don’t have bosses. We don’t have rules. We don’t have, you know, rituals. We don’t have things we do on a Sunday or Saturday. So that’s one class of questions where they’re thinking, well, is this just another religion. And the answer is; one, no, it’s a worldview, a way of thinking. The other thing that tends to happen is because they’re used to being taught religious worldviews that offer them quite often [inaudible]. I’m being a little unfair because this isn’t true. After all, many religions, inquiry and openness are part of what they teach as well. But often the simple story told to kids is quite a closed story; who created the universe, who created humans what are the rules we should follow, what are the rituals we should do, there’s an answer, right. And it’s in the textbook and you read it and that’s it. So the answer is closed. So one of the fun things about teaching about sentientism is that as soon as you say to them most sentientists don’t believe that God created the earth, or they don’t believe that God created humans; we believe in, an evolutionary approach to understanding biology. And we use physics to understand the evolution of the universe, they start asking you questions about everything because they’re so used to being told, well, here’s the answer, here’s the book that has the answer. So to suddenly be told we don’t know many of those answers, but here are the fields that are trying to work it out. So kids will ask me how did the universe get created, where did life come from, where did humans come from, what is consciousness, how will the universe end? You know, what do you mean that banana I had for lunch is my cousin?

So, I mean, it’s absolutely brilliant. But that’s, so that’s, it’s such a buzz having those conversations because it’s, it’s not a closed subject where you say, well, we’ve taught you this old book, and now you know the answers, it’s a gateway to the entire fields of the humanities and science and philosophy.

And instead of me telling them the answers in that room, although I’d love to have a go at it, the answer is go find out and here are all of the fields of human knowledge. And that’s the fun, that’s the curiosity. And you’ve got to live with the uncertainty about those big, those big questions. So there’s hopefully gives you a flavor of some of the questions I get, but it’s a bit mind blowing.

[00:39:14] Amy H-L: Can students incorporate sentientism into their actions as well as their subjects?

[00:39:18] Jamie W: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like any worldview, in a way, it influences almost everything you think and do because it’s the grounding for the things you believe, and it’s the grounding for what you think matters and what you think it means to lead a good life. So it’s quite hard to summarize the implications of that. I think for many students, it would reinforce universal compassion for all humans. It would reinforce a commitment to reject all negative forms of discrimination, whether that’s homophobia, transphobia, casteism, lookism, racism, sexism, you know, the list goes on, right.

There’s sentientism, like, humanism would say, look, we should reject all that stuff. We’re all sentient beings. So I think it has those types of implications for our intrahuman ethics and the problems we face within the human species. It clearly has implications for that radical extension to non-human sentient beings, or, you know, in shorthand, animals, and most students have already broken that boundary already because they care about companion animals in their homes or selected wild animals. So we’re just being consistent here and say, look, let’s go beyond that. But that does lead students into thinking about their product choices and ideas like veganism and many other implications in that space. And I think it would also shift the way they think about epistemology too.

Hopefully, it would help them develop their skills in critical thinking, trusting the right sources. Does that obvious grifter flogging supplements and online courses that I saw on YouTube really understand what I need for my personal health or should I go somewhere else? So hopefully as they navigate this complex and messy world of mis- and disinformation and conspiracism, that naturalistic commitment would help them as well. So there’s a bunch of things there I hope a student could build in. And I think there are also changes that students can suggest their schools make too, whether it’s getting the school to sign up to a plant-based treaty or trying to influence the school’s own curriculum to infuse some of these ideas, and I think could be powerful sort of next steps for students that like the worldview.

[00:41:20] Jon M: Your website describes sentientism as a worldview and a movement. Would you explain the movement aspect? 

[00:41:27] Jamie W: Yeah, yeah, I should probably put movement in inverted commas because it’s very anarchic so far. At the moment, there’s no sort of organization or NGO or charity. There’s no membership. There’s no money. There’s no structure, really. But there are online forums and communities where people come together and discuss these ideas. They’re open to anyone interested, not just sentientists. There’s the website, there’s the podcast, there’s the YouTube, and there are more and more people who, whether it’s on their Twitter bio or something else, are saying I’m a sentientist and using it as a label to identify themselves.

So there’s an amorphous anarchic [inaudible] and there are people out there who think this way, most of whom have never heard of the word sentientism, by the way. This is a more common way of thinking than we might think. And many of those people just think this way, but have never heard of the term yet. So those people out are out there and they exist and they’re in around 120 different countries so far, based on the membership of our different social media forums.

The other aspect of a movement is, okay, what’s the movement? What are you actually trying to do? And I think most of the people who say, well, yeah, I think I have a sentientist worldview are already acting on it in some specific ways. So they might be working on human social justice causes. They might be working on animal advocacy. They might be working on ideas about mitigating wild animal suffering or promoting veganism or a just transition to a plant-based world. They might be working on improving critical thinking in schools or better epistemology or countering misinformation or conspiracism.

So they’re all there. There’s almost a complete scope of human-caused problems we might want to go and address or justice opportunities we might want to go after that are motivated by people’s sentientist worldview. And then there’s a smaller group of people who actually want to help promote the worldview itself.

And that’s a distinct thing. That’s, you know, can we take it into schools? Can we build the social media groups? Can we educate the public sharing the social media in there? podcast on YouTube. But that’s a smaller group of people who like the idea of trying to upgrade humanity’s worldview in general because that should improve every decision we take if we’re understanding reality a little bit better and we’re not excluding any sense of being from our thinking as we do. 

[00:43:34] Jon M: This has been fascinating. We’ll post links to your website and social media along with this episode and we just want to thank you, Jamie Woodhouse. 

[00:43:43] Jamie W: It’s been such a pleasure. And I’d love to continue the conversation. So yeah, if people want to reach out by the website, or if you just search for the word sentientism, so that’s sentient with ism on it, pretty much anywhere, you’ll come across our work. And we’re on most of the social media platforms. So yeah, please do reach out, let me know what you think. Brutal feedback is also welcome. And yeah, I hope your audience has found the idea interesting, and maybe a little compelling. 

[00:44:07] Amy H-L: And we’ll look forward to having you back on the show.

[00:44:10] Jamie W: I would love to do that.

[00:44:12] Amy H-L: Thank you, listeners. Check out our new video series, “What Would YOU Do?,” a collaboration with the Harvard Grad School of Education and EdEthics. Go to our website, ethicalschools.org, and click video. The goal of the series is not to provide right answers, but to illustrate a variety of ethical viewpoints.

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