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Biol Philos (2013) 28:130
DOI 10.1007/s10539-012-9351-1
Robert C. Jones
Received: 8 April 2012 / Accepted: 1 November 2012 / Published online: 20 November 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Abstract I sketch briey some of the more inuential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientic research. I argue that even the most progressive current welfare policies lag behind, are ignorant of, or arbitrarily disregard the science on sentience and cognition.
Keywords Animal Welfare Ethics Pain Sentience Cognition Agriculture
Speciesism Biomedical research
Introduction
The contemporary connection between research on animal1 cognition and the moral status of animals goes back almost 40 years to the publication of two inuential books: Donald Grifns The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience (1976) and Peter Singers groundbreaking Animal Liberation (1975). Since then, there has been a staggering amount of work exploring the scientic and ethical dimensions of animal physiology and cognition. Almost all
1 I will use the terms animals and nonhuman animals interchangeably throughout the paper to refer to nonhuman animals.
R. C. Jones (&)
Department of Philosophy, California State University, Chico, 121 Trinity Hall, Chico, CA 95929, USAe-mail: [email protected]
Science, sentience, and animal welfare
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2 R. C. Jones
theories concerned with the moral status of animals rely on scientic knowledge about the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals.
With this background in mind, the topography of this paper is this:I sketch briey some inuential contemporary moral theories concerned with the moral status of animals, highlighting the centrality of animal biology to each view. I then survey the data on animal cognition, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading (i.e., theory of mind). Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy: animals used in industrialized food production and in scientic research. I argue that even...