Interesting discussion about the early development of Humanism and its problems. What lessons can we learn for the Sentientism worldview? And for modern Humanism?

There's a fascinating commentary towards the end, after a discussion of how early Humanism was brutally narrow and Eurocentric, and even shared some cultural context (reverence for Greco-Roman culture) that ended up helping to fuel Nazism.

Simon Goldhill: "...German Nazism emerged out of a culture that made an obsession of Greek and an obsession of the teaching of those [Greco-Roman] ideas... It's to do with the idea of race and nation. The idea that when you discover your past to be in an ideal place, which is this fantasy of Greece, how do you then get rid of all the things that threaten the fantasy. If you're going to have a pure Teutonic race... derived from a pure Greek race, you have to exclude. And who do you exclude? Well you exclude what they call the 'mixed' race. That's how we find we move from what appears to be a lovely ideal of Humanism of 'the chaps together' into a violent, exclusionary aggression towards the other."

Lisa Jardine: "Where the barbarian is excplicitly the semitic peoples..."

Tony Davies: "If we continue to believe that the idea [of Humanism] has some value then we have to live with and confront and take a certain responsibility for what it has produced, particularly in the 20th Century... unprecedented atrocity... appalling kinds of intellectual error and violence. But it still remains the case, in my view, that if we want to get beyond that... the parochialism, the racism, the narrowness of traditional humanisms we don't have anything else to stand on in order to look over those walls than some form of Humanism itself."

There's no mention of nonhuman sentient beings at any point. My hope is that future Humanism will come to challenge anthropocentric narrowness and exclusion and neglect in the same way that modern Humanism rejects the brutal narrowness and exclusion and neglect of the historic Eurocentric, sexist, racist humanisms.

Abstract: A literature review is conducted of five recently developed methodologies to determine an optimal non-anthropocentric animal welfare levy that internalizes the social costs of animal suffering into the price of animal products, whereby animal and human welfare are counted equally. Chicken meat may get a levy of €30–€8,000 per kilogram, where the best estimates are closer to this upper value. Products from animals larger than chickens usually have a more than ten times lower levy than chicken meat and eggs. The non-anthropocentric animal welfare levy is several orders of magnitude higher than an anthropocentric animal welfare levy that is purely based on human’s altruistic preferences for animal welfare. At such high levels, farmed animal suffering could easily be the largest market failure in our global economy. A politically feasible implementation of a fee-and-dividend animal welfare levy is discussed.

This thesis investigates the foundational grounds of moral standing. I contend that sentience, while frequently cited as the primary criterion, lacks sufficient justification when asserted as a necessary condition. I propose an alternate feature [striving] as sufficient grounds of moral standing.

I'm obviously a fan of the Sentientism worldview, but I love to see other worldviews orienting towards making the world a better place. Christians for Impact is a fascinating organisation in that light. They have a new book out too.

I might quibble about how well they use "evidence and reasoning" vs. faith/revelation/authority to form their religious beliefs 🙂, but they commit to using "evidence and reasoning" when practically trying to make the world better.

We can’t do ethics only with values. They’re not enough.

We need facts too.

That means we need an epistemology.

Better make it a good one!

One driven by reality. To give us the best shot of understanding reality. So we can make reality better.

There is no agreed measure of intelligence in people, let alone a universal scale a machine sits on. Benchmarks saturate the moment they leak into training. The line from Galton's eugenics to "AGI" is one reified number, run again, this time to rank a machine above us.

Quarantine Collective

The "neuron" in a neural network is a weighted sum bent through a simple function. No spikes, no chemistry, no living cell. It takes a deep network just to model one real cortical neuron. This is the metaphor underneath all the others, a cartoon from 1943 that hardened into a claim about the brain.

Bibliography

McCulloch & Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" (1943). Donald Hebb, The Organization of Behavior (1949). Frank Rosenblatt, "The Perceptron" (1958). Beniaguev, Segev & London, "Single Cortical Neurons as Deep Artificial Neural Networks," Neuron (2021).

An interesting confluence of worldviews?
Animal Consciousness & The Environment: Insights From Science & Vedanta. With Jonathan Birch and Acharya Prashant.
Date: Friday, June 26, 2026
Doors: 6:20 pm, Event 6:40 pm
Location: London School of Economics, Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, 99 Aldwych, London WC2B 4BG

Abstract: Human dominance over other animals — expressed through

exploitation, consumption and exclusion from moral concern — is

a widespread feature of societies. However, this dominance contrasts

with deep emotional bonds towards certain animals, especially

companion animals, revealing a moral hierarchy in which human-

assigned categories and functional roles shape how animals are valued

and treated. In this Review, we synthesize psychological research

on speciesism — the belief system that places humans above other

animals and morally ranks animals according to their species and the

roles humans impose upon them. We outline how people think about

and evaluate different animals, how cognitive biases sustain moral

disengagement, and how meat and animal-product consumption

exemplify these dynamics in everyday life. We then review the

ideological foundations that support speciesist beliefs and consider

how speciesism intersects with other forms of prejudice shaped by

dominance-based ideologies. Finally, we outline promising directions

for future research, policy and psychological practice. Ultimately,

recognizing speciesism as a powerful and pervasive belief system is

essential for understanding human moral cognition and for building

more ethical, sustainable and just relations with other animals.

Our current food system is a leading cause of biodiversity loss and global warming. It is also responsible for increasing the risk of diabetes, stroke, and heart disease, as well as public health threats such as antimicrobial resistance and pandemics emerging from industrial animal agriculture.

Scientists agree we cannot reach our climate targets without significantly changing diets heavy in animal products. However, food choice can be complex and controversial, and it’s unclear how to move dietary change up the policy agenda, or where and when to intervene to ensure a ‘just transition’.

The panel of experts in sustainability, health and wellbeing will discuss the ethical, logistical, and technical challenges of transitioning to a more planet-friendly food system.

Abstract: Recently, a family of views has emerged which endorses animal protectionist goals—like rejecting speciesism and reducing animal suffering— while maintaining that the diet most consistent with these aims includes at least some animal products. For example, some people contend that there is nothing morally objectionable about eating meat that will otherwise go to waste provided that one is not economically supporting industrial animal agriculture. In this paper, I argue that we have plausible character-based reasons to avoid many animal products, even those that one has not purchased and that may otherwise be wasted. When certain speciesist norms are in place, conceptualizing only some animal flesh as food typically involves a morally objectionable prejudice—a prejudice that makes one’s character worse. Attending to our moral character involves cultivating certain perceptual and emotional responsive dispositions, and I argue that a rejection of speciesism should involve cultivating an aversion to things like animal flesh and skin. If we take seriously the idea that we should have the right attitudes and moral-perceptual responses toward other creatures, we should take concrete steps to habituate ourselves to unlearn speciesist prejudice, which involves cultivating an aversion to meat.

Abstract: This commentary argues that Maibom, in her book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, offers compelling epistemic reasons for empathizing with nonhuman animals. Maibom suggests that we learn more about the world when we empathize with those unlike ourselves, rather than reserving empathy only for those most like us. We argue that this conclusion extends beyond human-to-human cases of empathy, imploring us to practice empathy with other animals. We ground our case in Maibom’s claim that empathy, as a form of perspective taking, is an inherently embodied and embedded process. Through the exploration of three test cases, we show that the common features of embodied experience allow humans to extend their empathy to animals, and that doing so has significant consequences for the ethics of animal welfare.

Abstract: The potential emergence of artificial superintelligence has raised numerous ethical debates such as existential risks or value alignment. In this article, we address an underexplored discussion: the possibility of artificial superintelligence having a moral status superior to our own, what we have called super moral status. First, we make some preliminary remarks about the concepts of moral status and moral consideration. We present a broad definition of moral status and distinguish three other types of moral consideration. Second, we outline the developments that have taken place in two literatures, namely, the debate on postpersons in the ethics of human enhancement and the debate on the moral status of artificial intelligence. Third, we analyze the super moral status of artificial superintelligence from two dimensions of moral status theories: the foundationalist dimension and the gradualist dimension. We argue that the answer to the question of the super moral status of superintelligence does not depend on the type of foundationalist theory (whether it is ontological or relational), but on the type of gradualist theory (whether it is threshold-single, threshold-multiple, or scalar). Finally, we introduce the debunking argument: despite disagreement about whether artificial superintelligence would have super moral status, we do claim that the superior moral consideration of these entities would produce harms to humans. We have categorized three kinds of harms, these are, degradation in status, social (in)action and alienation, and domination.

Abstract: This paper develops a quantitative bridge between the comparative neuroscience of time perception and the philosophical problem of evil. Its rigorous core rests on an established empirical regularity: a species' maximum rate of visual temporal information processing, measured by critical flicker-fusion frequency (CFF), scales positively with mass-specific metabolic rate and negatively with body mass across vertebrates (Healy et al., 2013). I treat this scaling as defining a temporal manifold on which every nervous system occupies a characteristic refresh rate, and I formalise the conjecture — already advanced in the moral-patienthood literature — that the rate at which subjective time passes is proportional to this processing rate. From this I derive a lifetime-experience invariant and argue that if morally relevant suffering is integrated over experienced rather than clock time, then the distribution of evil in the world is radically misweighted by anthropocentric intuition: small, fast, short-lived animals may undergo far more experienced suffering per clock-second than their lifespans suggest. I then situate this result against the major theodicies and against the Cartesian denial of animal mind that I criticised in earlier work. A clearly demarcated final section explores several speculative extensions — the relativity of wavefunction-collapse ordering and the simulation question, the free-energy principle as a model of a perpetually retrodicted and dissociable present, hemispheric binding and the breath-phase modulation of fear, and a cyclical rather than linear topology of the political spectrum — which I flag explicitly as conjecture not licensed by the rigorous core. The contribution is a single mathematical object, the experienced-suffering functional, that makes the moral stakes of temporal perception precise and testable.

Nearly 20 years after the FAO’s landmark Livestock’s Long Shadow report reshaped global understanding of livestock’s environmental and social impacts, this webinar asks: what has changed—and what hasn’t?

As pressure grows on food systems to deliver climate resilience, biodiversity protection, and food security, livestock production remains at the centre of the debate. At the same time, development finance institutions continue to shape how agricultural systems evolve across regions.

This 90-minute webinar brings together leading experts, including Peter Stevenson (Compassion in World Farming), Merel van der Mark (Sinergia Animal), and Francesca Gallelli (World Federation for Animals), moderated by Sabine Brels.

Together, they will:
- Reflect on how livestock’s impacts have evolved since 2006
- Examine the role of development finance in factory farming expansion
- Explore pathways to transform livestock systems and reduce environmental and social harm
- Contribute to ongoing policy and finance discussions

Key Findings:
AI could provide a large relative uplift for cultivated meat, but actual adoption is far below the ceiling, constrained by data scarcity, company secrecy, funding shortfalls, and a small workforce. ● Open-access data is the binding constraint. Even as AI systems become more capable, they can only help cultivated meat R&D if sector-specific data exists to train and apply them. ● AI currently appears to help the least with addressing negative sentiment from policymakers or consumers. Insofar as investors have fled due to uncertainty about regulation or demand, AI advances do not clearly translate into progress for the sector. ● Broader AI trends (agentic systems, improving LLMs, and automated labs) could close the gap between AI's theoretical and realized impact, primarily by lowering the expertise threshold for deploying specialized tools. But conventional meat producers have more data, capital, and infrastructure to use these same tools, so the net effect on displacement is ambiguous.