Aditya is the wild animal suffering outreach coordinator for Animal Ethics in India. He works in grass-roots animal activism with a variety of organisations. He is studying Animal Protection Law at the National Legal Studies Research Institute in India.
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 video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
0:00 Welcome
1:22 Aditya's Intro - Animal Advocacy in India
2:10 What's Real? From Hinduism to naturalism
- Growing up Hindu and vegetarian
- Vedanta. Dualistic theism. Dharma
- Exploring other forms of spirituality after getting into animal advocacy
- Veganism clashed with the culture (e.g. dairy)
- Buddhism
- Jiddu Krishnamurti, embracing naturalism and rationalism.
5:00 What Matters Morally?
- The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would want to be treated
- Learning about sentience, suffering & harm
- "I used to just consider humans... but when I adopted a dog (Gini!) my whole worldview shifted"
- Ahimsa as a theme in many worldviews, but most vegetarians in India don't have a strong connection with farmed animal suffering
- Sentience as central - the capacity to feel pain or pleasure
- Singer's Animal Liberation
- Sharing a stress reaction with Gini to fireworks
- "When you realise that all you've been taught through your life is wrong"
- Speciesism & arbitrary discrimination
- Going vegan. Practically easy but some social challenges
- Bio, ecocentrism, holism
- Nature as sacred in some traditions
- "We need to focus on sentient beings not abstract entities"
- "Who is being harmed?"
- Don't harm sentient beings to protect non-sentient things
- A lack of relationship doesn't justify moral exclusion
- Even simpler sentients might suffer just as much
- It's not just avoiding harming, its an obligation to help
- It doesn't matter whether the cause of harm is human or not
 19:00 Wild animal suffering
- We need to correct the belief that "if humans leave nature alone nature will be perfect". Nature is not idyllic
- High offspring r-strategies drive massive suffering & death
26:15 The Future - dystopias & utopias
- The risk of creating new dystopias (e.g. insect farming, colonising other planets with more farmed/wild sentient suffering, artificial sentients)
- Ending speciesism & granting moral consideration to all sentients
- Technology is a double-edged sword
- We need moral as well as tech innovation
- Fixing current problems & avoiding creating new ones
30:26 Which entities are sentient?
- Sentience as a biologically evolved class of information processing
- Updating our assessment of sentience using science
- Is centralisation of structures required?

...and much more. Full show notes on YouTube and Sentientism.info.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at https://sentientism.info/. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall using this form.
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Thanks Graham for the post-prod.