Jonathan Birch | |
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Alma mater | University of Cambridge (BA, MPhil, DPhil) |
Organization | London School of Economics and Political Science |
Website | personal |
Jonathan Birch is a British philosopher and professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work addresses the philosophy of biology and behavioural sciences, especially questions concerning sentience, bioethics, animal welfare, and the evolution of social behaviour and social norms. [1]
In 2017, he published the book The Philosophy of Social Evolution, which explores social behaviour in everything from microorganisms to humans and higher primates. [2] In 2021, he was the Principal Investigator of a review that led the UK to recognize cephalopods and decapod crustaceans as sentient. [3] In 2024, he published the book The Edge of Sentience, which examines the concept of sentience, whether artificial intelligence or animals like insects may be sentient, and how to handle the uncertainty. [4]
Birch read for a Bachelor of Arts with honours in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge from 2005 to 2008, and then an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge from 2008 to 2009. [5] He read for a DPhil in the Philosophy of Science at Cambridge from 2009 to 2013. [5] His thesis, which was supervised by Tim Lewens, was entitled Kin Selection: A Philosophical Analysis. [6]
From 2012 to 2014, Birch held a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge. [5] He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2014, [8] the same year he took up an Assistant Professorship at the Department of Philosophy Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2014. [5] [1] In 2017, he published his first monograph, The Philosophy of Social Evolution, with Oxford University Press. The book explores the philosophical foundations of social evolution theory, as founded by W. D. Hamilton, including Hamilton's rule, kin selection, and inclusive fitness. Birch makes the case that social evolution theory offers potential for furthering understanding of a range of areas of evolutionary science, including microbial evolution and human evolution, as well as in diverse studies of cooperation. [9] In 2018, Birch was promoted to Associate Professor. [5] From 2020, Birch was the principal investigator for the five-year Foundations of Animal Sentience (ASENT) research project at LSE, which was funded by the European Research Council. Responding to controversies around the nature and attribution of animal sentience, the project seeks to develop "a conceptual framework for thinking about sentience as an evolved phenomenon that varies along several dimensions, a deeper understanding of how these dimensions of sentience relate to measurable aspects of animal behaviour and the nervous system, and a richer picture of the links between sentience, welfare and the ethical status of animals". [10]
Birch was the lead author of a report entitled Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, published in 2021. The report recommended that cephalopods and decapod crustaceans should be considered sentient under the Animal Welfare Act 2006 and other UK laws. [7] The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, when initially drafted in 2021, recognised only vertebrates as sentient. In response to Birch's report, however, the Act was amended to include cephalopods and decapods. [3] In 2023, Birch was promoted to Professor. [11]
In March 2024, Birch was appointed to the Animals in Science Committee. [11] [12] Later that year, along with Jeff Sebo and Kristin Andrews, he launched the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. [13] The declaration affirms that "there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds"; that "the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects)", and that "when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal". [14]
Birch's second book, The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI, was released in open access in July 2024 by Oxford University Press. [4] [15] The book examines topics such as the mind-body problem, which entities can be considered sentience candidates, [a] how to handle uncertainty, reasonable precautions, policy proposals, and distinctive challenges in the case of AI. [16]
Birch was in Vox's 2024 "Future Perfect 50", a list highlighting individuals contributing to a better future. [17]
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: CS1 maint: date and year (link)The precautionary principle is a broad epistemological, philosophical and legal approach to innovations with potential for causing harm when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking. It emphasizes caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations that may prove disastrous. Critics argue that it is vague, self-cancelling, unscientific and an obstacle to progress.
Crabs are decapod crustaceans of the infraorder Brachyura, which typically have a very short projecting tail-like abdomen, usually hidden entirely under the thorax. They live in all the world's oceans, in freshwater, and on land. They are generally covered with a thick exoskeleton. They generally have five pairs of legs, and they have pincer claws on the ends of the frontmost pair. They first appeared during the Jurassic period, around 200 million years ago.
Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes. Sentience is an important concept in ethics, as the ability to experience happiness or suffering often forms a basis for determining which entities deserve moral consideration, particularly in utilitarianism.
Artificial consciousness, also known as machine consciousness, synthetic consciousness, or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience.
Cephalopod intelligence is a measure of the cognitive ability of the cephalopod class of molluscs.
Agent detection is the inclination for animals, including humans, to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent in situations that may or may not involve one.
Yew-Kwang Ng is a Malaysian-Australian economist, who is currently Special Chair Professor of Economics at Fudan University, Shanghai, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He has published in a variety of academic disciplines and is best known for his work in welfare economics.
Animal ethics is a branch of ethics which examines human-animal relationships, the moral consideration of animals and how nonhuman animals ought to be treated. The subject matter includes animal rights, animal welfare, animal law, speciesism, animal cognition, wildlife conservation, wild animal suffering, the moral status of nonhuman animals, the concept of nonhuman personhood, human exceptionalism, the history of animal use, and theories of justice. Several different theoretical approaches have been proposed to examine this field, in accordance with the different theories currently defended in moral and political philosophy. There is no theory which is completely accepted due to the differing understandings of what is meant by the term ethics; however, there are theories that are more widely accepted by society such as animal rights and utilitarianism.
Fish fulfill several criteria proposed as indicating that non-human animals experience pain. These fulfilled criteria include a suitable nervous system and sensory receptors, opioid receptors and reduced responses to noxious stimuli when given analgesics and local anaesthetics, physiological changes to noxious stimuli, displaying protective motor reactions, exhibiting avoidance learning and making trade-offs between noxious stimulus avoidance and other motivational requirements.
Pain negatively affects the health and welfare of animals. "Pain" is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage." Only the animal experiencing the pain can know the pain's quality and intensity, and the degree of suffering. It is harder, if even possible, for an observer to know whether an emotional experience has occurred, especially if the sufferer cannot communicate. Therefore, this concept is often excluded in definitions of pain in animals, such as that provided by Zimmerman: "an aversive sensory experience caused by actual or potential injury that elicits protective motor and vegetative reactions, results in learned avoidance and may modify species-specific behaviour, including social behaviour." Nonhuman animals cannot report their feelings to language-using humans in the same manner as human communication, but observation of their behaviour provides a reasonable indication as to the extent of their pain. Just as with doctors and medics who sometimes share no common language with their patients, the indicators of pain can still be understood.
There is a scientific debate which questions whether crustaceans experience pain. It is a complex mental state, with a distinct perceptual quality but also associated with suffering, which is an emotional state. Because of this complexity, the presence of pain in an animal, or another human for that matter, cannot be determined unambiguously using observational methods, but the conclusion that animals experience pain is often inferred on the basis of likely presence of phenomenal consciousness which is deduced from comparative brain physiology as well as physical and behavioural reactions.
Whether invertebrates can feel pain is a contentious issue. Although there are numerous definitions of pain, almost all involve two key components. First, nociception is required. This is the ability to detect noxious stimuli which evokes a reflex response that moves the entire animal, or the affected part of its body, away from the source of the stimulus. The concept of nociception does not necessarily imply any adverse, subjective feeling; it is a reflex action. The second component is the experience of "pain" itself, or suffering—i.e., the internal, emotional interpretation of the nociceptive experience. Pain is therefore a private, emotional experience. Pain cannot be directly measured in other animals, including other humans; responses to putatively painful stimuli can be measured, but not the experience itself. To address this problem when assessing the capacity of other species to experience pain, argument-by-analogy is used. This is based on the principle that if a non-human animal's responses to stimuli are similar to those of humans, it is likely to have had an analogous experience. It has been argued that if a pin is stuck in a chimpanzee's finger and they rapidly withdraw their hand, then argument-by-analogy implies that like humans, they felt pain. It has been questioned why the inference does not then follow that a cockroach experiences pain when it writhes after being stuck with a pin. This argument-by-analogy approach to the concept of pain in invertebrates has been followed by others.
Sentientism is an ethical view that places sentient individuals at the center of moral concern. It holds that both humans and other sentient individuals have interests that must be considered. Gradualist sentientism attributes moral consideration relatively to the degree of sentience.
Welfare biology is a proposed cross-disciplinary field of research to study the positive and negative well-being of sentient individuals in relation to their environment. Yew-Kwang Ng first advanced the field in 1995. Since then, its establishment has been advocated for by a number of writers, including philosophers, who have argued for the importance of creating the research field, particularly in relation to wild animal suffering. Some researchers have put forward examples of existing research that welfare biology could draw upon and suggested specific applications for the research's findings.
Pain in cephalopods is a contentious issue. Pain is a complex mental state, with a distinct perceptual quality but also associated with suffering, which is an emotional state. Because of this complexity, the presence of pain in non-human animals, or another human for that matter, cannot be determined unambiguously using observational methods, but the conclusion that animals experience pain is often inferred on the basis of likely presence of phenomenal consciousness which is deduced from comparative brain physiology as well as physical and behavioural reactions.
Gary Edward Varner was an American philosopher specializing in environmental ethics, philosophical questions related to animal rights and animal welfare, and R. M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism. At the time of his death, he was an emeritus professor in the department of philosophy at Texas A&M University; he had been based at the university since 1990. He was educated at Arizona State University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison; at Madison, where he was supervised by Jon Morline, he wrote one of the first doctoral theses on environmental ethics. Varner's first monograph was In Nature's Interests?, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. In the book, Varner defended a form of biocentric individualism, according to which all living entities have morally considerable interests.
Jeffrey Raymond Sebo is an American philosopher. He is clinical associate professor of environmental studies, director of the animal studies MA program, and affiliated professor of bioethics, medical ethics, and philosophy at New York University. In 2022, he published his first sole-authored book, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves.
The ethics of uncertain sentience refers to questions surrounding the treatment of and moral obligations towards individuals whose sentience—the capacity to subjectively sense and feel—and resulting ability to experience pain is uncertain; the topic has been particularly discussed within the field of animal ethics, with the precautionary principle frequently invoked in response.
The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It was introduced to Parliament by the Government of the United Kingdom at the 2021 State Opening of Parliament. The act recognises animal sentience in law for the first time. The scope of the legislation includes all vertebrates and some invertebrates such as octopuses and lobsters.
Octopus bocki is a species of octopus, which has been located near south Pacific islands such as Fiji, the Philippines, and Moorea and can be found hiding in coral rubble. They can also be referred to as the Bock's pygmy octopus. They are nocturnal and use camouflage as their primary defense against predators as well as to ambush their prey. Their typical prey are crustaceans, crabs, shrimp, and small fish and they can grow to be up to 10cm in size.