I don’t personally endorse Dennett’s view on this, I give to animal causes, and I think it is a big mistake to be so sure of it that you ignore the risk of animal suffering entirely, plus I don’t think we can just assume that animals can’t be introspectively aware of their own experiences.
FWIW, Dennett ended up believing chickens, octopuses and bees are conscious, anyway. He was an illusionist, but I think his view, like Keith Frankish’s, was not that an animal literally needs to have an illusion of phenomenal consciousness or be able to introspect to be conscious in a way that matters. The illusions and introspection just explain why we humans believe in phenomenal consciousness, but first-order consciousness still matters without them.
And he was a gradualist. He thought introspection and higher-order thoughts made for important differences and was skeptical of them in other animals (Dennett, 2018, p.168-169). I don’t know how morally important he found these differences to be, though.
FWIW, Dennett ended up believing chickens, octopuses and bees are conscious, anyway. He was an illusionist, but I think his view, like Keith Frankish’s, was not that an animal literally needs to have an illusion of phenomenal consciousness or be able to introspect to be conscious in a way that matters. The illusions and introspection just explain why we humans believe in phenomenal consciousness, but first-order consciousness still matters without them.
And he was a gradualist. He thought introspection and higher-order thoughts made for important differences and was skeptical of them in other animals (Dennett, 2018, p.168-169). I don’t know how morally important he found these differences to be, though.
I think that Dennett probably said inconsistent things about this over time.