Helen (@hkopnina) is Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Business at the University of Northumbria & also lectures at The Hague University. Her research focuses on environmental education, biodiversity & corporate sustainability.

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:

00:00 Welcome

01:12 Helen's Intro

02:49 What's Real?

- The passage to caring about ecosystems for many ecocentrists was through a connection to individual animals

- Growing up atheist "just like everybody else in the Soviet Union" in Moscow

- Parents who were "wild about wilderness"

- Visiting Siberia "in the summer & without gulags"

- "I loved fairy tales" but firmly naturalistic

- "I'm still 99% atheist with 1% reserved for doubt"

- Political dissident parents, pushing back on ideology

- "When you don't have religion you create a religion yourself - & that was communism... we had Lenin & Marx as our gods..."

- Lenin, Marx & Engels as a "holy trinity"?

- "My parents instructed me that it was bullshit"

- Naturalistic ontology (no supernatural) & epistemology (use evidence & reason)

- Flat earth, anti-vaxx, one party states...

13:45 What (& Who) Matters?

- Kant, deontology, consequentialism...

- "You can call me a cynic - I don't think there is any absolute morality - I think we invent it."

- Injustice & unfairness

- Frans de Waal's fairness experiments with chimps

- "Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are all about us humans" (vs. https://sentientism.info/how/sentientist-development-goals)

- "Why don't we have the same moral consideration for billions of other living beings - it just seems inconsistent... unjust"

- Environmental Justice isn't about the env. its about distribution of goods & harms among humans

- Wokeness, fairness, division & distribution. The risks of forcing pure equality (e.g. Soviet Union - bloody revolution then a new elite emerges)

- Avoiding relativism & nihilism. Can we construct a universal morality?

- The impacts on Soviet Union of WWII then Stalin

- "I see our planet as one of billions - so it doesn't really matter"

- Anthropology & cultural relativism "why is human sacrifice & cannibalism a good thing?"

- Moral progress "but things can be turned back too"

- Survival & reproductive rationales for morality "Otherwise you get beaten up"

- "Anger at inconsistency... it pisses me off that it just applies to one single species"

- Feminism: "I'm just not interested to be honest"

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info and on YouTube.

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall via this simple form.

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Thanks Graham.