Marginalium

Godfrey-Smith on animal sentience. Implications on how we treat them.

People sometimes dismiss arguments for ameliorating the lives of animals because these ideal outcomes are unclear. And some of the hard questions in this area will stay hard or get harder. Views presently looking to change our relationships with animals often focus on the category of sentience, where some animals are inside this category, deserving protection, and others are outside. But sentience itself is very probably something that exists in borderline forms and by degree; it is not a matter of yes or no. Something part-way to sentience – hemi-demi-sentience, as the US philosopher Daniel Dennett would call it – is probably present in vast numbers of tiny invertebrate animals around us. How are concern and protection to be conceived in cases like those? But the fact that we can’t tie up every question does not prevent a proactive approach to issues that many paths forward from here will agree on.