The ethics of veganism
Carlo Alvaro in Raw Veganism, 2020
Second: What is a sentient being? The definition of sentience denotes the capacity to feel and to have subjective conscious experience. Is this capacity enough to assign moral importance? Here is an argument to consider: observation reveals that sentience is not an all-or-nothing property; rather it comes in degree. Functional adult humans are considered by many to be the paradigm of sentience. As we move down to lower beings, the degree of sentience also diminishes. Apes, for example, being the closest relatives to humans, are very much aware of their existence, though they lack the higher cognitive functions characteristic of humans. Squirrels exhibit an even lower degree of sentience than apes and humans. Moving down the ladder we find farm animals. The argument then is that when humans feel pain or pleasure, they are also aware that they are feeling pain or pleasure. Conversely, animals lack subjective awareness of their mental states. Not all animals. Perhaps, many would accept that the great apes are self-aware. But this doesn’t matter because humans, usually, do not raise apes, for food. Animals like cows, pigs, chickens, lambs, on the other hand, are sentient but, if they are in pain, (the argument goes) they are not aware that they are.12 Consequently, many argue that it is morally permissible to kill and eat those animals because raising and killing them can cause them pain, but they are not aware of that pain.
Investigating links between diet and health outcomes
Geoffrey P. Webb in Nutrition, 2019
The use of sentient, live animals is an emotive issue and the ethical case for their continued use fails unless there is convincing evidence that they are vital to the rapid advance of medical understanding and treatments. Table 4.2 shows that over an 80-year period around 90% of Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine have made use of non-human species in their research. Nobel prizes provide an unbiased sample of key landmark advances in human biology and medicine including the discovery of several vitamins. The greater use of microbes after 1942 reflects the growth in molecular biology because much of our current knowledge of molecular genetics comes from work with microorganisms. It is difficult to sustain the argument that studies with non-human organisms have not made a critical contribution to biomedical understanding and to the treatment and prevention of disease.
Issues in Fisheries and Aquaculture
Joyce D’Silva, John Webster in The Meat Crisis, 2017
How then do noxious stimuli affect their behaviour, and what does that say about sentience and suffering? At the most basic level, in many species of vertebrate including man, noxious stimuli increase heart and ventilation rate, raise the circulating levels of the stress hormone cortisol and the animal attempts to move away from the stimulus. If escape is impossible, they change their behaviour by, for example, sparing an injured limb, freezing or hiding. Man, when experiencing pain, will seek analgesics such as paracetamol. Fish behave in a remarkably similar way. They try to avoid noxious stimuli, change their behaviour to reduce the effects of the stimuli by, for example, shaking the head or rubbing the mouth on surfaces to try to remove the source of pain. Fish learn quickly to avoid noxious stimuli, and after only one hooking experience with a particular bait become more difficult to catch on that bait (Verheijen and Buwalda 1988). Of course, hooking involves pain and fear, a doubly motivating experience. Specific bait avoidance like this is known to last months or years. Further evidence of the level of sentience in fish comes from observational learning studies which show that fish can interpret the experiences of conspecifics and modify their behaviour and responses accordingly (Brown and Laland 2003).
Human Cerebral Organoids: Implications of Ontological considerations
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2023
Hassan Khuram, Parker Maddox, Aria Elahi, Rahim Hirani, Ali Issani
The article “Consciousness in a Bioreactor? Science and Ethics of Potentially Conscious Human Cerebral Organoids” (Zillo and Lavazza 2023) presents a thoughtful discussion on the potential ethical implications of Human Cerebral Organoids (HCOs). The authors argue that HCOs are a unique entity in the field of organoids as they have the potential to resemble a fundamental organ of the human organism, which could potentially show signs of consciousness in the future. Given this, the authors recommend using a precautionary principle that avoids underestimating the moral status of HCOs. However, the authors also highlight that sentience is not the sole criteria for moral consideration and the amount of moral consideration a particular being deserves depends on the sort of being it is. They further argue that despite its human origin, an HCO is not structurally capable of becoming a human individual, and hence potential moral overestimation of HCOs should be avoided, especially if their use can lead to important therapeutic benefits for human beings. We believe that the authors’ analyses and recommendations provide a valuable contribution to the bioethical science community. However, their claim that ontological considerations are also necessary when developing an ethical framework for HCOs raises important follow-up questions and implications. Namely, what are the ramifications of ontological classification of HCOs as it relates to research in animals and the donors of stem cells for HCOs?
Some Reflections on the Importance of Philosophy to Bioethics
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Assuming that any adequate account will incorporate the judgment that sentience is sufficient for moral status, what are the implications for future advanced robots or other forms of artificial intelligence, if any, that achieve consciousness (the capacity to have subjective experiences) and sentience (the capacity to have pleasant or unpleasant experiences)? No doubt the advance of robotics and AI will provoke what I call “a second wave of speciesism”: an irrational bias in favor of human beings and against other beings or entities—in this instance, artificial ones—who are comparable in relevant ways (DeGrazia 2022). Many people will ignore evidence in denying that AI, no matter what it achieves, is capable of thought, creativity, moral judgment, autonomy, consciousness, and sentience. And many people will deny the moral implications of AI’s becoming sentient if we see the day when it is reasonable to believe, and unreasonable to deny, that some artificial entities are sentient. This point takes us to an epistemological issue that implicates the philosophy of mind and various empirical disciplines.
Neurons Embodied in a Virtual World: Evidence for Organoid Ethics?
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2022
Brett J. Kagan, Daniela Duc, Ian Stevens, Frederic Gilbert
Foremost, it is important to distinguish between key states which organisms may possess. Sawai et al. (2022) focus their discussion on phenomenological consciousness, characterized by what-it’s-likeness, which they use interchangeably with the term sentient. While colloquially the terms are exchangeable, it is imprecise and may lead to some conceptual conflations and to the wrong ethical conclusion. For the purpose of this commentary the term consciousness is used in line with phenomenological consciousness as per Sawai et al. (2022) Sentience on the other hand has been formally defined as “responsive to sensory impressions” (Friston, Wiese, and Hobson 2020). While the two are intuitively related and would typically coexist, it is possible to imagine states where they may present exclusively. For example, Type 1 Blindsight patients present with visual sentience—where they can receive visual information, process that information, then act upon it—while reporting no conscious experience of the stimulus. Accordingly, the definition of consciousness needs to be better defined regarding organoids and in vitro neuronal tissues. Such definitions need to include all aspects of consciousness to measure and determine its presence in tissues (engineered or other). Specific definitions would consider other aspects of consciousness for clearer and objective classifications, such as first-person introspective, qualitative character, phenomenal, subjectivity, perspectival, intentionality and transparency, unity and importantly, dynamic flow (Van Gulick 2021).
Related Knowledge Centers
- Consciousness
- Creativity
- Intelligence
- Qualia
- Experience
- Sense
- Emotion Perception
- Fear
- Grief
- Mind