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An acknowledgement of the moral standing of all sentient beings
An acknowledgement of the moral standing of all sentient beings
Project 1 | Members: Brenda de Groot, Luca Hahn, & Jacy Reese Anthis
"Consciousness is of paramount importance to all of us.
By definition it is the universe of our awareness.
On the assumption that many other species are conscious or sentient
I have suggested that our morality is based upon a concern for all sentients - which I have called sentientism." (Ryder, 1990; p.4).
Description
Sentientism is a moral framework or philosophy that takes sentience (i.e., the capacity to feel, perceive or experience life subjectively) as the criterion for moral consideration (for a discussion on the meaning of sentience and sentientism, see Roelofs, 2022). Sentientism can be regarded as an informed upgrade to humanism, expanding our moral concern beyond the borders of our own species. Both science and reason endorse sentientism, and while many scholars support a sentientist ethic, until today, no paper exists that explicitly calls for sentientism as a moral foundation. The aim of this project is to write and publish exactly such a paper.
It is fair to say that our envisioned publication is long overdue. In our largely anthropocentric world, animals’ existence, consciousness and intrinsic value are still knowingly and unknowingly ignored or violated by humans in a systematic way. Considering the content and scale of the ongoing human-induced suffering, we can state that we currently live in the greatest moral catastrophe in the history of the Earth. It is time to update our current anthropocentric moral paradigm to a sentiocentric one, and this project will contribute to that goal.
To maximise the impact of this paper, we will recruit prominent, high-profile scholars in the field of animal ethics, animal mind and (critical) animal studies, requesting them to be co-authors of the paper to underwrite the message. We hope the paper will provide a resource for other scholars who argue for the acknowledgement of the moral standing for all sentient beings.
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