Sentientism

Sentientism (or sentiocentrism) is an ethical view that places sentient individuals at the center of moral concern. It holds that both humans and other sentient individuals have interests that must be considered.^[1] Gradualist sentientism attributes moral consideration relatively to the degree of sentience.^[2]

Sentientists consider that arbitrarily giving different moral weight to sentient beings based solely on their species membership is a form of unjustified discrimination known as speciesism. Many self-described humanists see themselves as "sentientists" where the term humanism contrasts with theism and does not describe the sole focus of humanist concerns. Sentientism stands in opposition to the philosophy of anthropocentrism.^[3]

Origin

The term sentientism was used by John Rodman in 1977 who referred to Peter Singer's philosophy as "a kind of zoöcentric sentientism".^[4][5] Andrew Linzey defined the term in 1980 to denote an attitude that arbitrarily favours sentients over non-sentients.^[6]

History

English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), early proponent of sentientism

The 18th-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham was among the first to argue for sentientism.^[3] He maintained that any individual who is capable of subjective experience should be considered a moral subject.^[7] Members of species who are able to experience pleasure and pain are thus included in the category.^[7] In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham made a comparison between slavery and sadism toward humans and non-human animals:

The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor [see Louis XIV's Code Noir] ... What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

— Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, (1823), 2nd edition, Chapter 17, footnote

The late 19th- and early 20th-century American philosopher J. Howard Moore, in Better-World Philosophy (1899), described every sentient being as existing in a constant state of struggle. He argued that what aids them in their struggle can be called good and what opposes them can be called bad. Moore believed that only sentient beings can make such moral judgements because they are the only parts of the universe which can experience pleasure and suffering. As a result, he argued that sentience and ethics are inseparable and therefore every sentient piece of the universe has an intrinsic ethical relationship to every other sentient part, but not the insentient parts.^{[8]: 81–82} Moore used the term "zoocentricism" to describe the belief that universal consideration and care should be given to all sentient beings; he believed that this was too difficult for humans to comprehend in their current stage of development.^[8]: 144

Other prominent philosophers discussing or defending sentientism include Joel Feinberg,^[4] Peter Singer,^[9][1] Tom Regan,^[10] and Mary Anne Warren.^[11]

Concept

Sentientism posits that sentience is the necessary and sufficient condition in order to belong to the moral community.^[12] Other organisms, therefore, aside from humans are morally important in their own right.^[13] According to the concept, there are organisms that have some subjective experience, which include self-awareness, rationality as well as the capacity to experience pain and suffering.^[14]

There are sources that consider sentientism as a modification of traditional ethic, which holds that moral concern must be extended to sentient animals.^[15]

Peter Singer provides the following justification of sentientism:

The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a child. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being tormented, because mice will suffer if they are treated in this way. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that the suffering be counted equally with the like suffering – in so far as rough comparisons can be made – of any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account. This is why the limit of sentience (...) is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others.

— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (2011), 3rd edition, Cambridge University Press, p. 50

Utilitarian philosophers such as Singer care about the well-being of sentient non-human animals as well as humans. They reject speciesism, defined by Singer as a "prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species". Singer considers speciesism to be a form of arbitrary discrimination similar to racism or sexism.^[16][17]

Gradualist sentientism proposes that the value of sentient beings is relative to their degree of sentience, which is assumed to increase with the cognitive, emotional and social complexity.^[2]

Criticism

John Rodman criticized the sentientist approach, commenting "the rest of nature is left in a state of thinghood, having no intrinsic worth, acquiring instrumental value only as resources for the well-being of an elite of sentient beings".^[18]

The sentientism of Peter Singer and others has been criticized for holding the view that only sentient creatures have moral standing because they have interests.^[4] A human corpse for example may deserve respect and proper treatment even though it lacks sentience and can no longer be harmed. The claim that only sentient beings have interests has also been questioned as a person in a coma is not sentient but is still being cared for.^[4] Philosopher Gregory Bassham has written that "many environmentalists today reject sentientism and claim instead that all living things, both plants and animals, have moral standing".^[4]

See also

• Ethics of uncertain sentience
• Speciesism
• Veganism
• Wild animal suffering

References

1. Hettinger, Ned (1998). "Environmental Ethics" (PDF). In Bekoff, Marc; Meaney, Carron A. (eds.). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. p. 159. ISBN 9780313352553.
2. Allegri, Francesco (June 2023). "Beyond Anthropocentrism? Yes, but in What Direction?". Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism. 11. doi:10.7358/rela-2023-01-allf.
3. Baber, Walter F.; Bartlett, Robert V. (2015). Consensus and Global Environmental Governance: Deliberative Democracy in Nature's Regime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 178. ISBN 978-0-262-52722-4.
4. Bassham, Gregory (2020). Environmental Ethics: The Central Issues. Hackett Publishing Company. pp. 51–52. ISBN 978-1624669392.
5. Rodman, John (1977). "The Liberation of Nature?". Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. 20 (1): 83–131. doi:10.1080/00201747708601834.
6. Bekoff, Marc (1998). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Routledge. p. 311. ISBN 978-1579580827.
7. Mills, D. S.; Marchant-Forde, Jeremy N. (2010). The Encyclopedia of Applied Animal Behaviour and Welfare. Oxfordshire: CABI. p. 27. ISBN 978-0-85199-724-7.
8. Moore, John Howard (1899). Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis. Chicago: The Ward Waugh Company.
9. Singer, Peter (2011). Practical Ethics (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-0521707688.
10. Regan, Tom (2004). The Radical Egalitarian Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 82–90.
11. Warren, Mary Anne. A Critique of Regan's Animal Rights Theory. pp. 90–97.
12. Erdős, László (2020). Green Heroes: From Buddha to Leonardo DiCaprio. Springer Nature. p. 87. ISBN 978-3-030-31806-2.
13. Bekoff, Marc (2009). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, 2nd Edition [2 volumes]: Second Edition. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 221. ISBN 978-0-313-35255-3.
14. M.Konisky, David (2020). Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. p. 392. ISBN 978-1-78897-284-0.
15. Bekoff, Marc; Meaney, Carron A. (1998). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Oxon: Routledge. p. 159. ISBN 978-1-135-93002-8.
16. Hopster, Jeroen (2019-12-01). "The Speciesism Debate: Intuition, Method, and Empirical Advances". Animals. 9 (12): 1054. doi:10.3390/ani9121054. ISSN 2076-2615. PMC 6940905. PMID 31805715.
17. Singer, Peter (2015). Animal Liberation (5th ed.). Open Road Integrated Media. Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.
18. Mappes, Thomas A.; Zembaty, Jane S. (1992). Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy. McGraw-Hill. p. 478. ISBN 978-0070401334.

Further reading

• MacClellan, Joel P (2012) "Minding Nature: A Defense of a Sentiocentric Approach to Environmental Ethics" University of Tennessee.