Sentience
Sentience is the capacity to be affected positively or negatively. It is the capacity to have experiences. It is not the mere capacity to perceive stimuli or react to some action, as in the case of a machine that performs certain functions…
How does consciousness emerge? We don’t yet know what causes it to arise. We do have reasons to conclude certain animals are sentient, while others are not.
Consciousness is being aware. Self-consciousness is being aware of oneself. Being conscious, rather than self-conscious, is the key concept in ethics.
Animal sentience studies look at nonhuman animals’ ability to have positive and negative experiences. At the most basic level, positive and negative experiences are pain and pleasure…
Animal sentience has received little attention by those who have studied the characteristics and capabilities of nonhuman animals. This is unfortunate, because animal sentience is a very important issue. Sentience is what matters when we consider which beings to give moral consideration to. Due to this, we need to study the issues of what physical structures are necessary for sentience, which beings are sentient, and what interests sentient beings may have.
In order to understand these problems there are several questions that must be addressed.
How can we guess whether a certain being is sentient or not? There are several criteria that nonhuman animals satisfy that give us reasons to conclude they are.
Those who deny that animal sentience sometimes claim that it cannot be demonstrated whether animals are sentient. But there are powerful reasons to reject such a view.
Given the criteria we have for considering whether a being is conscious, it is reasonable to conclude that vertebrates and a large number of invertebrates are conscious. The clearer cases are those of animals…
There are animals that don’t have the physical structures that are needed in order to have experiences. They include those that lack any nervous system and those whose nervous systems…
This article considers the relevant features of the nervous systems of different invertebrates with regard to their physiology, with simplified illustrations.
Even if we conclude that many nonhuman animals are sentient beings, we may still not be able to recognize situations in which they are suffering. There are several indicators that can help us determine in which cases animal sentience is present…
Animal sentience has received little attention by those who have studied the characteristics and capabilities of nonhuman animals. This is unfortunate, because animal sentience is a very important issue. Sentience is what matters when we consider which beings to give moral consideration to. Due to this, we need to study the issues of what physical structures are necessary for sentience, which beings are sentient, and what interests sentient beings may have.
In order to understand these problems there are several questions that must be addressed.
There are people who argue that in order to be fully respected, one must belong to the human species. In addition, those who reject the full moral consideration of nonhuman animals sometimes maintain an environmentalist…
There are a number of environmentalist positions that oppose granting equal respect to all sentient beings.
One view that is often defended by environmentalists is that we should care primarily about ecosystems…
It is often believed that species should be considered and preserved because they have some sort of value in themselves…
