Lori Gruen

[eve_prime]

Tonight was a big campus talk by Lori Gruen, a philosopher and the author of Entangled Empathy. Her message is that we can be more likely to make the cognitive effort to learn more about others' perspectives, which is important to ethics, if we realize that we are not abstract and separate individuals, but individuals who are already in relationship with these others. For example, we can be more motivated to do right by the animals who are in factory farms if we realize that we are already in relationship with these animals by virtue of eating meat (or living in a society that condones or promotes eating meat).

I spoke with her briefly afterwards, and I'm going to send her my yellowjackets essay. I had read her book this week and was delighted to see that she mentioned Marti Kheel, who I knew back when I lived in Oakland.

A lot of people in the Q&A session had things to say about our spiritual connectedness with trees and other plants. Very Oregon of them, I thought.