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 audio is on our Podcast: https://apple.co/391khQO & https://open.spotify.com/show/3c9OG5M....

00:00 Clips!
01:25 Welcome
- Shared Sentientism guests with ‪@thinklikeavegan‬ :
- Troy Vettese episode:    • Half-Earth Socialism - Troy Vettese -...  
- Josh Milburn episode:    • "Animal activists don't have to be on...  
- Aysha Akhtar episode:    • "Ending animal testing is a win-win f...  
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?
- JW: Are nihilism, relativism and divine command theory more "amoralities" than moralities?
- "You have to realise there is an other"
- Doing talks at a Himalayan vegan festival in Nepal
- "You have to be able to move forward... the facts on the ground now" (as opposed to just doing what we've always done)
- Ethics that focus on moral agents (virtue, care) vs. moral patients (suffering, freedom)
- "For me a right is something that is inherent - you have that by virtue of being alive and being a sentient being... beingness"
- "You have to have the interests... a subject of a life... you exist"
- JW "They [your perspective/interests] matters to you... and a right is... just saying... they should matter to everyone else too?"
- Gender, sex etc... "aren't morally relevant"
- "There's a variety of different rights... but the fundamental right of being free from exploitation number one... if you don't have that you can't get any of the other ones"
- "Being free... to exist unfettered in the most basic way... that's the fundamental. Everything else builds on top of that... [e.g.] the right to vote..."
53:13 Who Matters?
01:00:42 A Better World?
01:22:00 Follow Emilia
- https://emisgoodeating.com/
- https://open.spotify.com/episode/78C2...
- https://x.com/emisgoodeating
- https://birchfieldhighlands.org/

& much more... (sentientism.info for full notes) #sentientism
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