Sentientism | "If you combine rationality & compassion you have the essence" - Jonathan Leighton @OPISOrg - Ep:185 @Sentientism | Uploaded February 2024 | Updated October 2024, 21 minutes ago.
Jonathan is an ethics strategist, writer, social change advocate and public speaker. He is Executive Director of the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS), a Swiss-based think-and-do tank that promotes the prevention of human and non-human suffering as our overriding global ethical priority. His book, The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe, explores the question "What matters?". His new book The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering goes further in proposing a rigorous reassessment of how we think about ethics.
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: apple.co/391khQO & https://anchor.fm/sentientism.
We discuss:
00:00 Clips!
01:00 Welcome
03:34 Jon's Intro
- Molecular biology PhD
- Ethicist
- Writing "The Battle for Compassion" and "The Tango of Ethics"
- Running the "think and do tank" OPIS "Trying to put the ideas into practice"
04:41 What's Real?
- A scientific family, physicist father
- "A naturalistic, mechanistic way of thinking about the world"
- "It's not that there was no #spirituality at all... a #Jewish household that was more traditional than religious... Reciting things that I didn't necessarily understand the meaning of"
- "...a brief phase where I did take things [religious prescriptions] more literally... but that didn't last very long"
- "Seeing the world as inherently physical"
- "Not to say that the subjective doesn't matter... the subjective is the essence of what matters"
- Maternal grandfather "I remember him describing himself as a Humanist... his way of saying 'don't take the supernatural too seriously'"
- "I think spirituality is an important part of life... but I don't think of spirituality in the supernatural sense... I think of spirituality in terms of the experience... a feeling that there is an intense meaning possible in life."
- "During spiritual experiences we might suspend the very rational perspective. You can't really be fully plunged into a spiritual experience if you're also trying to analyse things scientifically at the same time."
- In circles with people, lighting a fire, reciting poetry... "it feels like a source of meaning at times to get into that other state of mind."
- "How do we reconcile the need to understand reality as accurately as possible using the tools of rationality and science and how do we also extract meaning from our existence?"
- JW: Instead of a scientistic denial or a mystical reification of the subjective... a recognition that our subjective experiences are part of the objective world we all share... and are the source of its value and meaning
- Subjective experience is determined by the physical "but you won't actually know what it's like... without having experienced it yourself"
13:25 What Matters?
- "Subjective experience... it's the most important part of reality... the only part of reality that really matters when it comes down to ethics... what it's actually like for #sentient beings to experience the world"
- The "is-ought" chasm
- "I explicitly try to avoid the use of traditional moral language... to get away from terms like 'ought' and 'should'"
- "I try to take a very naturalistic approach to ethics... things we can truthfully say about subjective experience"
- Descriptive vs. prescriptive ethics
- Challenging traditional ethical approaches, intuitions and assumptions
- "The starting point is subjective experience because without subjective experience there's nothing for anything to matter to"
- "I make a distinction between subjective experiences that there is an urgency to change and subjective experiences that there is no urgency to change... This is what makes suffering unique [and distinct from happiness]... suffering is a state of being that inherently calls for action."
- "Different states of being matter"
- Rejecting moral realism doesn't mean that "nothing matters"
- "There is this fundamental asymmetry between suffering and happiness"
- "We can ground everything, not in moral realism, but in rationality itself"
- "If you combine rationality and compassion you have the essence of ethical or moral thinking"
- "In fact, you could argue that compassion is rational"
46:40 Who Matters?
01:03:37 How To Make A Better World?
01:19:43 Follow Jon and OPIS
- jonathanleighton.org
- preventsuffering.org
& much more... (sentientism.info for full notes)#sentientism
#sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all #sentient beings.” More at sentientism.info/. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall sentientism.info/wall/.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. E.g.: facebook.com/groups/sentientism.
Jonathan is an ethics strategist, writer, social change advocate and public speaker. He is Executive Director of the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS), a Swiss-based think-and-do tank that promotes the prevention of human and non-human suffering as our overriding global ethical priority. His book, The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe, explores the question "What matters?". His new book The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering goes further in proposing a rigorous reassessment of how we think about ethics.
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: apple.co/391khQO & https://anchor.fm/sentientism.
We discuss:
00:00 Clips!
01:00 Welcome
03:34 Jon's Intro
- Molecular biology PhD
- Ethicist
- Writing "The Battle for Compassion" and "The Tango of Ethics"
- Running the "think and do tank" OPIS "Trying to put the ideas into practice"
04:41 What's Real?
- A scientific family, physicist father
- "A naturalistic, mechanistic way of thinking about the world"
- "It's not that there was no #spirituality at all... a #Jewish household that was more traditional than religious... Reciting things that I didn't necessarily understand the meaning of"
- "...a brief phase where I did take things [religious prescriptions] more literally... but that didn't last very long"
- "Seeing the world as inherently physical"
- "Not to say that the subjective doesn't matter... the subjective is the essence of what matters"
- Maternal grandfather "I remember him describing himself as a Humanist... his way of saying 'don't take the supernatural too seriously'"
- "I think spirituality is an important part of life... but I don't think of spirituality in the supernatural sense... I think of spirituality in terms of the experience... a feeling that there is an intense meaning possible in life."
- "During spiritual experiences we might suspend the very rational perspective. You can't really be fully plunged into a spiritual experience if you're also trying to analyse things scientifically at the same time."
- In circles with people, lighting a fire, reciting poetry... "it feels like a source of meaning at times to get into that other state of mind."
- "How do we reconcile the need to understand reality as accurately as possible using the tools of rationality and science and how do we also extract meaning from our existence?"
- JW: Instead of a scientistic denial or a mystical reification of the subjective... a recognition that our subjective experiences are part of the objective world we all share... and are the source of its value and meaning
- Subjective experience is determined by the physical "but you won't actually know what it's like... without having experienced it yourself"
13:25 What Matters?
- "Subjective experience... it's the most important part of reality... the only part of reality that really matters when it comes down to ethics... what it's actually like for #sentient beings to experience the world"
- The "is-ought" chasm
- "I explicitly try to avoid the use of traditional moral language... to get away from terms like 'ought' and 'should'"
- "I try to take a very naturalistic approach to ethics... things we can truthfully say about subjective experience"
- Descriptive vs. prescriptive ethics
- Challenging traditional ethical approaches, intuitions and assumptions
- "The starting point is subjective experience because without subjective experience there's nothing for anything to matter to"
- "I make a distinction between subjective experiences that there is an urgency to change and subjective experiences that there is no urgency to change... This is what makes suffering unique [and distinct from happiness]... suffering is a state of being that inherently calls for action."
- "Different states of being matter"
- Rejecting moral realism doesn't mean that "nothing matters"
- "There is this fundamental asymmetry between suffering and happiness"
- "We can ground everything, not in moral realism, but in rationality itself"
- "If you combine rationality and compassion you have the essence of ethical or moral thinking"
- "In fact, you could argue that compassion is rational"
46:40 Who Matters?
01:03:37 How To Make A Better World?
01:19:43 Follow Jon and OPIS
- jonathanleighton.org
- preventsuffering.org
& much more... (sentientism.info for full notes)#sentientism
#sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all #sentient beings.” More at sentientism.info/. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall sentientism.info/wall/.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. E.g.: facebook.com/groups/sentientism.
