Jonathan Birch on "Animal Sentience and Interspecies Welfare Comparisons"

“Animal Sentience and Interspecies Welfare Comparisons" by Jonathan Birch, Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics, was presented on 30 November 2023 as part of the Centre's 2023 Talking Animals, Law & Philosophy online series, a welcoming, engaging and rigorous forum for debate and ideas about the relations between animals, law, and philosophy. Events in this series are held via Zoom, free and open to all.
The views expressed in these talks are those of the respective speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law.
The series is made possible through generous sponsorship by the International Society for Animal Rights (ISAR). The work of the Centre is supported by the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law & Policy.
The Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law is an academic centre dedicated to the study, understanding and promotion of fundamental rights for non-human animals, based in Cambridge, UK. Find more information at animalrightsla...

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sentience:
the capacity to experience feelings or sensations, as distinguished from perceptions and cognition. The word was first coined by philosophers in the 1630s for the concept of an ability to feel, derived from Latin “sentientem” (a feeling), in order to distinguish it from the ability to think/reason. Therefore, sentience ought not be confused with consciousness, though the two are closely related.
As far as biologists can ascertain, the simplest organisms (single-celled microbes) possess an exceedingly-primitive form of sentience, since their life-cycle revolves around adjusting to their environment, metabolizing, and reproducing via binary fission, all of which indicates a sensory perception of their environment (e.g. temperature, acidity, energy sources and the presence of oxygen, nitrogen, minerals, and water). More complex organisms, such as plants, have acquired a far greater degree of sentience, since they can react to the light of the sun, to insects crawling on their leaves (in the case of carnivorous plants), excrete certain chemicals and/or emit ultrasonic waves when being cut. Perhaps the most strikingly-obvious phenomenon that demonstrates plant sentience is the way in which vines SENSE the presence of external structures, using such formations to support their stems and tendrils whilst growing.
In animal life, there are up to five sensory organs that are able to detect external stimulants or percepts.
ADDITIONALLY, many forms of metazoans have acquired a degree of consciousness, in which a subject-object polarity is established.
Therefore, when carnists claim that “plants have feelings too” upon being confronted with vegan ideology, they may be correct (at least in a rather diffuse sense of the term “feelings”), so the most logical reason for being vegan is not because plants are completely without sentience, but simply due to the fact that humans are an herbivorous species. If Homo sapiens were naturally omnivores or carnivores, then no sane person would condone veganism. In summary, all forms of organic life are, by definition, sentient, yet TRUE consciousness is found in those animal species that have a certain level of intelligence (that is, as a general rule, vertebrates, though there are a couple of notable exceptions to this general rule). Cf. “consciousness/Consciousness” and “carnist” in this Glossary.