"If you combine rationality & compassion you have the essence" - Jonathan Leighton @OPISOrg - Ep:185

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: https://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
- https://www.jonathanleighton.org/
- https://www.preventsuffering.org/

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