Granting even basic rights of physical security to sentient animals requires an end to animal farming and a complete transition to arable agriculture. We need to think of causing suffering and death to farm animals in the same way as we think of causing suffering and death to pets or charismatic wild animals. Using animals for our food, drink and in products is not sufficient justification. As with humans, causing suffering and even death is sometimes justified, but the reason needs to be powerful and robust. This sentientist approach has far reaching implications, particularly for how we treat animals. These things may well be important to the experiences and survival of sentient animals and humans and hence need protection-but they cannot suffer and therefore don’t need their own separate rights.
These include corporations, plants, species, rivers, mountains or other aspects of the natural environment. Using sentience as our determining characteristic also helps us clarify entities that don’t need rights. Why grant rights to something that cannot suffer? Why not grant rights to something that can? Humanist ethics alone are unlikely to be persuasive to non-humans. We might also come to hope that future artificial or alien intelligences themselves subscribe to sentientist ethics-for our own sakes. Non-biological suffering would be no less genuine. Sentience seems to be an advanced class of information processing that could conceivably run on a range of substrates. A focus on sentience helps us to do this without being locked into arbitrary species definitions or even a particular type of biology, hardware or software. This may happen soon, or never, but our rights frameworks and philosophies should be future-proofed just in case. Also, given the role of animal farming in accelerating the climate emergency, the interests of human and non-human animals are rapidly converging.Īt the same time, while human and non-human animals are the clear priority for this next generation of rights thinking, we may also eventually create or encounter other forms of sentient being. But we do know that these non-human animals exist now, and their rights and the rights of humans should be a global priority. For some species, we’re not yet sure either way. We need more research in this area, but current science indicates that mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and most fish and insects are sentient.
The same approach leads us to the conclusion that many animals are sentient. Given that humans behave in similar ways and have roughly the same neural hardware, it seems reasonable to assume we are all sentient. The sentience of others may seem more philosophically tricky, but we can confidently infer sentience from observing behaviour and function (for example, via FMRI scans and anatomy). If we accept that argument, the next question is “What things are sentient?” To start, we are all confident of our own sentience. I argue that if granting rights is about reducing suffering, we should grant them to anything capable of suffering. Other activists focus on fully conscious, autonomous, self-determining moral objects that warrant “personhood”. Cruelty prevention organisations such as the RSPCA grant rights to pets and charismatic wild animals but fewer rights to farm animals. Anthropocentric humanists suggest that rights should be restricted to members of the human species. Why grant rights to something that cannot suffer? Why not grant rights to something that can? As Jeremy Bentham wrote in 1879, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Sentience is the morally salient component of consciousness. If our main objective in granting rights is to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing, using sentience as our main characteristic makes sense. In that sense, it is the morally salient component of consciousness. It’s the ability to suffer, to feel pleasure, to experience flourishing or well-being. Primarily, sentience is the capacity to experience subjectively. I propose we resolve these debates by focusing on the characteristic of sentience. Many are also debating which other entities should be given rights, including non-human animals, aspects of the natural environment, and even future artificial general intelligences. While many, sadly, still argue over which humans deserve rights, others have moved on to grant rights to all humans, most notably in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The question of who, and even what, deserves rights, has a history just as long. The granting of rights has been an important marker of humanity’s bumpy, uncertain progress.
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