Sentientism

Last updated November 30, 2024

Sentientism (or sentiocentrism) 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.^[1] Gradualist sentientism attributes moral consideration relatively to the degree of sentience.^[2]

Sentientists consider that arbitrarily giving different moral weight to sentient beings based solely on their species membership is a form of unjustified discrimination known as speciesism. Many self-described humanists see themselves as "sentientists" where the term humanism contrasts with theism and does not describe the sole focus of humanist concerns. Sentientism stands in opposition to the philosophy of anthropocentrism.^[3]

Origin

The term sentientism was used by John Rodman in 1977 who referred to Peter Singer's philosophy as "a kind of zoöcentric sentientism".^[4]^[5] Andrew Linzey defined the term in 1980 to denote an attitude that arbitrarily favours sentients over non-sentients.^[6]

History

The 18th-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham was among the first to argue for sentientism.^[3] He maintained that any individual who is capable of subjective experience should be considered a moral subject.^[7] Members of species who are able to experience pleasure and pain are thus included in the category.^[7] In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham made a comparison between slavery and sadism toward humans and non-human animals:

The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor [see Louis XIV's Code Noir] ... What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
— Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, (1823), 2nd edition, Chapter 17, footnote

The late 19th- and early 20th-century American philosopher J. Howard Moore, in Better-World Philosophy (1899), described every sentient being as existing in a constant state of struggle. He argued that what aids them in their struggle can be called good and what opposes them can be called bad. Moore believed that only sentient beings can make such moral judgements because they are the only parts of the universe which can experience pleasure and suffering. As a result, he argued that sentience and ethics are inseparable and therefore every sentient piece of the universe has an intrinsic ethical relationship to every other sentient part, but not the insentient parts.^[8]^: 81–82 Moore used the term "zoocentricism" to describe the belief that universal consideration and care should be given to all sentient beings; he believed that this was too difficult for humans to comprehend in their current stage of development.^[8]^: 144

Other prominent philosophers discussing or defending sentientism include Joel Feinberg,^[4] Peter Singer,^[9]^[1] Tom Regan,^[10] and Mary Anne Warren.^[11]

Concept

Sentientism posits that sentience is the necessary and sufficient condition in order to belong to the moral community.^[12] Other organisms, therefore, aside from humans are morally important in their own right.^[13] According to the concept, there are organisms that have some subjective experience, which include self-awareness, rationality as well as the capacity to experience pain and suffering.^[14]

There are sources that consider sentientism as a modification of traditional ethic, which holds that moral concern must be extended to sentient animals.^[15]

Peter Singer provides the following justification of sentientism:

The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a child. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being tormented, because mice will suffer if they are treated in this way. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that the suffering be counted equally with the like suffering – in so far as rough comparisons can be made – of any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account. This is why the limit of sentience (...) is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (2011), 3rd edition, Cambridge University Press, p. 50

Utilitarian philosophers such as Singer care about the well-being of sentient non-human animals as well as humans. They reject speciesism, defined by Singer as a "prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species". Singer considers speciesism to be a form of arbitrary discrimination similar to racism or sexism.^[16]^[17]

Gradualist sentientism proposes that the value of sentient beings is relative to their degree of sentience, which is assumed to increase with the cognitive, emotional and social complexity.^[2]

Criticism

John Rodman criticized the sentientist approach, commenting "the rest of nature is left in a state of thinghood, having no intrinsic worth, acquiring instrumental value only as resources for the well-being of an elite of sentient beings".^[18]

The sentientism of Peter Singer and others has been criticized for holding the view that only sentient creatures have moral standing because they have interests.^[4] A human corpse for example may deserve respect and proper treatment even though it lacks sentience and can no longer be harmed. The claim that only sentient beings have interests has also been questioned as a person in a coma is not sentient but is still being cared for.^[4] Philosopher Gregory Bassham has written that "many environmentalists today reject sentientism and claim instead that all living things, both plants and animals, have moral standing".^[4]

Related Research Articles

Speciesism is a term used in philosophy regarding the treatment of individuals of different species. The term has several different definitions. Some specifically define speciesism as discrimination or unjustified treatment based on an individual's species membership, while others define it as differential treatment without regard to whether the treatment is justified or not. Richard D. Ryder, who coined the term, defined it as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species". Speciesism results in the belief that humans have the right to use non-human animals in exploitative ways which is pervasive in the modern society. Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to have intersectional bias that encapsulates and endorses racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.

In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the affected individuals. In other words, utilitarian ideas encourage actions that lead to the greatest good for the greatest number. Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea behind all of them is, in some sense, to maximize utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being or related concepts. For instance, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described utility as the capacity of actions or objects to produce benefits, such as pleasure, happiness, and good, or to prevent harm, such as pain and unhappiness, to those affected.

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.

Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are the central or most important entity on the planet. The term can be used interchangeably with humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism. From an anthropocentric perspective, humankind is seen as separate from nature and superior to it, and other entities are viewed as resources for humans to use.

David Sztybel is a Canadian philosopher specializing in animal ethics.

Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all sentient animals have moral worth independent of their utility to humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. Broadly speaking, and particularly in popular discourse, the term "animal rights" is often used synonymously with "animal protection" or "animal liberation". More narrowly, "animal rights" refers to the idea that many animals have fundamental rights to be treated with respect as individuals—rights to life, liberty, and freedom from torture that may not be overridden by considerations of aggregate welfare.

Mary Anne Warren was an American writer and philosophy professor, noted for her writings on the issue of abortion and animal rights.

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.

The intrinsic value of a human or any other sentient animal comes from within itself. It is the value it places on its own existence. Intrinsic value exists wherever there are beings that value themselves.

Biocentrism, in a political and ecological sense, as well as literally, is an ethical point of view that extends equal inherent value to all living things. It is an understanding of how the earth works, particularly as it relates to its biosphere or biodiversity. It stands in contrast to anthropocentrism, which centers on the value of humans. The related ecocentrism extends inherent value to the whole of nature.

The Oxford Group or Oxford Vegetarians consisted of a group of intellectuals in England in the late 1960s and early 1970s associated with the University of Oxford, who met and corresponded to discuss the emerging concept of animal rights, or animal liberation.

Wild animal suffering is suffering experienced by non-human animals living in the wild, outside of direct human control, due to natural processes such as disease, injury, parasitism, starvation, malnutrition, dehydration, weather conditions, natural disasters, killings by other animals, and psychological stress. Some estimates indicate that these individual animals make up the vast majority of animals in existence. An extensive amount of natural suffering has been described as an unavoidable consequence of Darwinian evolution, as well as the pervasiveness of reproductive strategies, which favor producing large numbers of offspring, with a low amount of parental care and of which only a small number survive to adulthood, the rest dying in painful ways, has led some to argue that suffering dominates happiness in nature.

Alasdair Cochrane is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and Animal Rights Without Liberation. His third book, Sentientist Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focused on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals. He joined the Department at Sheffield in 2012, having previously been a faculty member at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics. Cochrane is a Sentientist. Sentientism is a naturalistic worldview that grants moral consideration to all sentient beings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Welfare biology</span> Proposed field of research

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.

John Hadley is an Australian philosopher whose research concerns moral and political philosophy, including animal ethics, environmental ethics, and metaethics. He is currently a senior lecturer in philosophy in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. He has previously taught at Charles Sturt University and the University of Sydney, where he studied as an undergraduate and doctoral candidate. In addition to a variety of articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, he is the author of the 2015 monograph Animal Property Rights and the 2019 monograph Animal Neopragmatism. He is also the co-editor, with Elisa Aaltola, of the 2015 collection Animal Ethics and Philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Varner</span> American philosopher (1957–2023)

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.

<i>Sentientist Politics</i> 2018 book by Alasdair Cochrane

Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice is a 2018 book by the English political theorist Alasdair Cochrane, published by Oxford University Press. In the book, Cochrane outlines and defends his political theory of "sentientist cosmopolitan democracy". The approach is sentientist in that it recognises all sentient animals as bearers of rights; cosmopolitan in that it extends cosmopolitan political theory to include animals, rejecting the importance of state borders and endorsing impartiality; and democratic in that it aims to include animals in systems of representative and cosmopolitan democracy. It was the first book to extend cosmopolitan theory to animals, and was a contribution to the "political turn" in animal ethics – animal ethics informed by political philosophy.

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Catia Faria is a Portuguese moral philosopher and activist for animal rights and feminism. She is assistant professor in Applied Ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and is a board member of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics. Faria specialises in normative and applied ethics, especially focusing on how they apply to the moral consideration of non-human animals. In 2022, she published her first book, Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature.

<i>Animal Ethics in the Wild</i> 2022 book by Catia Faria

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References

1 2 Hettinger, Ned (1998). "Environmental Ethics" (PDF). In Bekoff, Marc; Meaney, Carron A. (eds.). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. p. 159. ISBN 9780313352553.
1 2 Allegri, Francesco (June 2023). "Beyond Anthropocentrism? Yes, but in What Direction?". Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism. 11. doi:10.7358/rela-2023-01-allf.
1 2 Baber, Walter F.; Bartlett, Robert V. (2015). Consensus and Global Environmental Governance: Deliberative Democracy in Nature's Regime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 178. ISBN 978-0-262-52722-4.
1 2 3 4 5 Bassham, Gregory (2020). Environmental Ethics: The Central Issues. Hackett Publishing Company. pp. 51–52. ISBN 978-1624669392.
↑ Rodman, John (1977). "The Liberation of Nature?". Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. 20 (1): 83–131. doi:10.1080/00201747708601834.
↑ Bekoff, Marc (1998). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. ‎Routledge. p. 311. ISBN 978-1579580827.
1 2 Mills, D. S.; Marchant-Forde, Jeremy N. (2010). The Encyclopedia of Applied Animal Behaviour and Welfare. Oxfordshire: CABI. p. 27. ISBN 978-0-85199-724-7.
1 2 Moore, John Howard (1899). Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis. Chicago: The Ward Waugh Company.
↑ Singer, Peter (2011). Practical Ethics (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-0521707688.
↑ Regan, Tom (2004). The Radical Egalitarian Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 82–90.
↑ Warren, Mary Anne. A Critique of Regan's Animal Rights Theory. pp. 90–97.
↑ Erdős, László (2020). Green Heroes: From Buddha to Leonardo DiCaprio. Springer Nature. p. 87. ISBN 978-3-030-31806-2.
↑ Bekoff, Marc (2009). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, 2nd Edition [2 volumes]: Second Edition. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 221. ISBN 978-0-313-35255-3.
↑ M.Konisky, David (2020). Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. p. 392. ISBN 978-1-78897-284-0.
↑ Bekoff, Marc; Meaney, Carron A. (1998). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Oxon: Routledge. p. 159. ISBN 978-1-135-93002-8.
↑ Hopster, Jeroen (2019-12-01). "The Speciesism Debate: Intuition, Method, and Empirical Advances". Animals. 9 (12): 1054. doi: 10.3390/ani9121054 . ISSN 2076-2615. PMC 6940905 . PMID 31805715.
↑ Singer, Peter (2015). Animal Liberation (5th ed.). Open Road Integrated Media. Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.
↑ Mappes, Thomas A.; Zembaty, Jane S. (1992). Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy. McGraw-Hill. p. 478. ISBN 978-0070401334.