David Clough is Professor and Chair in Theology and AppliedSciences at the University of Aberdeen. He is a Local Preacher in the Methodist Church. David is also co-president of the charity CreatureKind and he founded the DefaultVeg project, now part of the work of the Better Food Foundation. From 2018 to 2021 hewas Principal Investigator on the Christian Ethics of Farmed Animal Welfare (CEFAW) project. David is the author of "On Animals" volumes one and two.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and "how can we make a better world?"
Sentientism answers those questions with "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips
00:48 Welcome
02:45 David's Intro
- Christian theology and ethics particularly re: non-human animals
- Writing "On Animals"
- "The moral emergency is the way that we're making use of other animals for food"
- "That makes very little sense if you care about non-human animals, if you care about human wellbeing or you care about our shared environment"
- "Once you've seen the problem... exposing billions of fellow creatures to significant unnecessary suffering... I've met first hand one to one a lot of animals who are caught up in this system... it's very hard to let go of that"
- "What motivates me each day... think of ways to help others glimpse what I've seen about the wrongness of what we're doing and how we might change it"
05:03 What's Real?
- "Thinking about how to make sense of things wasalways a big deal for me"
- Raised in the #christian #methodist Church
- Father from a line of Methodist ministers
- "That sense of being formed in a particular traditionand encountering other worlds through that experience of faith"
- "That was never in competition with exercising myrational faculties to the utmost"
- "I always wanted to ask bigger and bigger questionsabout the world"
- "If the kinds of things Christians believed in... auniverse dependent on God... if that made sense... then pushing with our utmostintellectual ability to try to understand better... could never be discoveringanything that was foreign to faith."
- "A faith-based formation and real a commitment topursuing intellectual and deep philosophical questions... always felt to me tobe one and the same project"
- Separate magisteria vs. a more integrated, consistentepistemology?
- "I would find it deeply, intellectually, unsatisfyingif I needed to compartmentalise in that kind of way"
16:45 What Matters?
40:36 Who Matters?
01:17:33 A Better World?
01:28:25 Follow David
- David at Aberdeen University
And more... full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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