Thanks for the interesting comment and many useful references. Speaking for myself and not for the rest of the team, I am very confident that dogs, pigs, cows, rats, and apes are all sentient and have the capacity for valenced experience. (That is, there is something it is like to be these animals and that experience includes pleasures and pains.) Whether or not these creatures are capable of higher-order conscious thought (that is, reflecting on their own first-order beliefs, desires, or emotional states) is debatable. I don’t think higher-order conscious thought is a necessary condition for sentience, but I do think it may be relevant to moral status. In fact, many of the features mentioned in your comment (e.g., episodic memory, emotional complexity and awareness, social communication, cause-and-effect thinking, executive control, autonomy, biographical sense of self) plausibly help determine a creature’s moral status. (Even if you are suspicious of degrees of moral status, you might think that these features contribute to the range and types of experiential states a creature can undergo and thus are important for determining a creature’s welfare.) So I think it would be good for the animal welfare movement to have a decent grasp of which of these features (as well as the other features that plausibly affect moral status) are exhibited by which animals. In the coming months, Rethink Priorities might have something more concrete to say about the topic.
I do agree that higher-order consciousness is unlikely to be necessary for sentience, but some disagree (not any of the authors here, AFAIK), and showing them that there’s a good chance many animals are capable of higher-order consciousness could lead to further consideration for these animals’ interests. Unfortunately, this may neglect many animals whom we think aren’t capable of higher-order consciousness or even entrench the view that higher-order consciousness is necessary.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the interesting comment and many useful references. Speaking for myself and not for the rest of the team, I am very confident that dogs, pigs, cows, rats, and apes are all sentient and have the capacity for valenced experience. (That is, there is something it is like to be these animals and that experience includes pleasures and pains.) Whether or not these creatures are capable of higher-order conscious thought (that is, reflecting on their own first-order beliefs, desires, or emotional states) is debatable. I don’t think higher-order conscious thought is a necessary condition for sentience, but I do think it may be relevant to moral status. In fact, many of the features mentioned in your comment (e.g., episodic memory, emotional complexity and awareness, social communication, cause-and-effect thinking, executive control, autonomy, biographical sense of self) plausibly help determine a creature’s moral status. (Even if you are suspicious of degrees of moral status, you might think that these features contribute to the range and types of experiential states a creature can undergo and thus are important for determining a creature’s welfare.) So I think it would be good for the animal welfare movement to have a decent grasp of which of these features (as well as the other features that plausibly affect moral status) are exhibited by which animals. In the coming months, Rethink Priorities might have something more concrete to say about the topic.
Agreed!
I do agree that higher-order consciousness is unlikely to be necessary for sentience, but some disagree (not any of the authors here, AFAIK), and showing them that there’s a good chance many animals are capable of higher-order consciousness could lead to further consideration for these animals’ interests. Unfortunately, this may neglect many animals whom we think aren’t capable of higher-order consciousness or even entrench the view that higher-order consciousness is necessary.