Hey readers,
A year ago, I fell in love with a duck.
Molly the Mallard, as I dubbed her, decided to nest in a flowerbed on the sidewalk right outside the Vox office. She looked so vulnerable, laying eggs in the middle of the bustling city, that I couldn’t help getting
emotionally invested. When the eggs hatched, would she manage to get her ducklings to water? How?
Soon, I found myself learning all about birds: how some use the sun and stars to navigate while others sense the Earth’s magnetic field; how individual birds — far from being driven by mere instinct — can make autonomous choices to split off from their migrating flock; how crows solve complex puzzles; and more.
I was wowed by avian intelligence. Books like Jennifer Ackerman’s
The Genius of Birds urged me on in this direction. And the more impressed I grew with birds’ smarts, the more my empathy for them increased.
That’s pretty common. As a recent
survey showed, people are more likely to want to help an animal when they believe that animal to be intelligent. It’s no accident that animal rights groups like the
Nonhuman Rights Project try to win legal status for apes, elephants, dolphins, and whales by focusing on their intelligence.
But the more I think about it, the more it strikes me that
intelligence is a terrible yardstick for determining how much care an animal deserves.
Why intelligence is a problematic criterion for moral value
Human beings are always underestimating the cognitive complexity of other species. The more scientific research we do, the more we learn that
chickens,
pigs, and other animals are smarter than we’d thought.
Part of the problem is that
we suffer from an anthropocentric bias: We tend to think something counts as intelligence only when it looks like our (human) intelligence.
“There’s a risk that if we talk in terms of ‘these animals are really smart and therefore we should protect them,’ then we risk reinforcing the idea that you need a certain kind of intelligence in order to be worthy of protection,” Jeff Sebo, a professor of environmental studies and philosophy at New York University, told me. “That might work well for some animals but less well for animals who are intelligent in different ways that we might not notice or appreciate.”
Instead, some say sentience –– the ability to have conscious experiences like pleasure and pain –– might be a better yardstick. Many philosophers (most famously, Peter Singer) argue that sentience is what confers moral status, and this view is at the center of today’s animal welfare movement.
It makes some intuitive sense. If you can’t feel pleasure or pain, then it doesn’t matter to you what happens to you. So, if you’re a rock, I should be able to kick you down the street for fun without feeling bad. But if you’re a mouse, I have a moral obligation not to do that because being kicked will feel really bad to you.
There’s a problem, though. Just like with intelligence,
humans constantly underestimate the sentience of other species. For example, many people think of fish as emotionally vacant, though recent studies
challenge that view.
Sebo, who believes that sentience is the criterion for moral worth, nevertheless told me, “I am a little bit humble here because I recognize that sentience is the next on a list of features that we share with other animals.”
Here’s what that means. Historically, societies started by thinking that being a male human is what matters, and then that being a human is what matters, and then that being an intelligent animal is what matters, and now that being sentient is what matters. So, Sebo said, “In light of that history, we should be a little skeptical of our current impression that we happen to now be fully morally enlightened and are including everybody we should be including.”
We should also ask: If you think sentience confers moral worth, exactly how much sentience is required to make the cut? And how do you measure it? Do you start counting the number of neurons in each animal and use that as a proxy? Is that a bad proxy?
These are devilishly hard questions, which some researchers are
trying hardto answer. But there’s an altogether different approach we can take.
What if anything that’s alive has moral worth?
In environmental ethics, some thinkers argue for biocentrism, the view that anything that’s alive (or that supports living things) has moral worth. Think plants and ecosystems.
Chris Cuomo, a philosopher at the University of Georgia, believes this is a much better view than the sentientist perspective. She told me a narrow focus on sentience “replicates a neoliberal tendency to focus our moral concern only on individual suffering and not on systems of oppression or systems of harm,” like environmental degradation. “It really leaves a lot out.”
By contrast, biocentrists are likely to concern themselves with climate change and
bad environmental practices that make pandemics more likely, in addition to animal welfare.
It’s worth noting that contemporary environmentalists definitely didn’t invent the idea of biocentrism. Certain peoples, like the Jains in India, have lived by this view for millennia.
It’s also worth noting that these different criteria — life, sentience, intelligence — are not necessarily mutually exclusive. We can have a
moral pluralismwhere we recognize that a being may be valuable in itself and as part of a larger ecosystem.
—Sigal Samuel,
@SigalSamuel
