Walter Veit

Beyond simple consciousness or sentience, some non-human animals may possess more sophisticated cognitive abilities linked to capacities for self-awareness or even personhood, capacities that may influence our attitudes toward the importance of their suffering. In this chapter, we first examine the concepts of consciousness, suffering, self-awareness, and personhood before surveying the current evidence for these capacities in different animal species and discussing their relevance to the moral importance of animal suffering. We argue that while self-awareness is not necessary for morally relevant suffering, it may serve to expand the range of ways in which an individual can suffer (including increasing the harm of death), as well as potentially grounding a higher level of moral status.

Recent discussions in animal welfare have emphasised the importance of animal agency—the ability of animals to make choices and exert control over their environment in a way that aligns with their needs and preferences. In this paper, we discuss the importance of animal agency for welfare and examine how use of some types of animal–computer interaction can enable animals to exercise more agency in captive environments through increased choice and control, cognitive challenge, and social interactions; as well as considering some of the potential limitations of such efforts.

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in the subject of animal consciousness. Conferences, journals, and new books are emerging at an accelerating rate. Why is this happening? In this article, I explain the ethical and scientific importance of animal consciousness that has fuelled this rising interest in animal minds. First, I will focus on the relevance of consciousness to the status of animals as subjects of moral concern. Second, I will explain the significance of the scientific study of animal consciousness for understanding consciousness more broadly, including insights into ourselves.

A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness aims to advance Donald Griffin’s vision of the “final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution” by firmly integrating animals within the science of consciousness. Although this field has largely neglected the questions of when and why consciousness evolved, this book champions a Darwinian philosophy where the experiences of other animals are put centre-stage in investigations of consciousness. This synopsis offers a summary of the book’s core arguments for the advancement of a truly biological science of consciousness. This approach allows for an empirically rigorous investigation into what it is like to be a bat, a crow, a bee, or an octopus.

In this paper, we revisit the long-standing debate of whether there is a pattern in the evolution of organisms towards greater complexity, and how this hypothesis could be tested using an interdisciplinary lens. We argue that this debate remains alive today due to the lack of a quantitative measure of complexity that is related to the teleonomic (i.e. goal-directed) nature of living systems. Further, we argue that such a biological measure of complexity can indeed be found in the vast literature produced within life history theory. We propose that an ideal method to quantify this complexity lies within life history strategies (i.e., schedules of survival and reproduction across an organism’s life cycle), as it is precisely these strategies that are under selection to optimise the organism’s fitness. In this context, we set an agenda for future steps: (1) how this complexity can be measured mathematically, and (2) how we can engage in a comparative analysis of this complexity across species to investigate the evolutionary forces driving increases or for that matter decreases in teleonomic complexity.

Ever since John Leslie Mackie’s ‘popularization’ of moral error theories in meta-ethics, increasing attention has been focused on how to escape the force of nihilism. For many opponents of the moral error theory, ‘moral nihilism’ is used as a derogatory synonym associated with immorality and selfishness, but such a defamatory usage of the label is obviously not very helpful for a serious philosophical examination of the view. The goal of this paper is to draw on insights by David Hume and other Humean philosophers such as J.L. Mackie, Richard Joyce, and Richard Garner, in order to turn ‘moral nihilism’ from a term of abuse to a ‘badge of honour’.

In this paper we argue that physical strength is in philosophical terms best understood as general agentive ability to exercise difficult physical effort. We develop this metaphysical claim about strength, by focusing on the historically developed most paradigmatic test of overall strength: The sport of Strong (Wo)Man. We extract the understanding of strength present in this sport, and show how the current philosophical agents' abilities, and physical effort, lend themselves to capture the essential features of strength, providing the justification for our claim. Finally we argue that strongman itself is already surprisingly well thought through to assess strength, balancing different tradeoffs that exist when quantitatively attempting to measure strength, making it a robust epistemic tool to determine strength in an interdisciplinary manner.

What is the role of consciousness in nature? The science of consciousness has largely neglected the question through its emphasis on human experience. In this précis of A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, I outline how we can move from a top-down approach that begins with investigations in humans to an evolutionary bottom-up approach that targets the adaptive origins of even the most minimal forms of subjective experience. I will also offer an introduction to the central thesis of the book, i.e. the pathological complexity thesis, according to which consciousness evolved in order to enable animals to adaptively respond to their life history challenges.

Ever since John Leslie Mackie’s ‘popularization’ of moral error theories in meta-ethics, increasing attention has been focused on how to escape the force of nihilism. For many opponents of the moral error theory, ‘moral nihilism’ is used as a derogatory synonym associated with immorality and selfishness, but such a defamatory usage of the label is obviously not very helpful for a serious philosophical examination of the view. The goal of this paper is to draw on insights by David Hume and other Humean philosophers such as J.L. Mackie, Richard Joyce, and Richard Garner, in order to turn ‘moral nihilism’ from a term of abuse to a ‘badge of honour’.

The axiom of transitivity has been challenged in economic theorizing for over seventy years. Yet, there does not seem to be any movement in economics towards removing classical rational choice models from introductory microeconomics books. The concept of rationality has similarly been employed in the cognitive sciences and biology, and yet, transitivity has here not only been shown to be violated, but also rationally so. Some economists have thus responded with attempts to develop alternative theories that give up on the axiom of transitivity. In this paper, I argue that there is a conceptual confusion in this debate that rests on the mistaken idea that there is something like the “one true theory of rationality” that can determine axioms like transitivity to be true or false. Instead, I defend a shift towards a pluralism of concepts of rationality as well as models in which transitivity should play a role depending on the purposes of the model at hand.

In the last two decades, there has been a blossoming literature aiming to counter the neglect of plant capacities. In their recent paper, Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Paco Calvo begin by providing an overview of the literature to then question the mistaken assumptions that led to plants being immediately rejected as candidates for sentience. However, it appears that many responses to their arguments are based on the implicit conviction that because animals have far more sophisticated cognition and agency than plants, and that plants should not have the same moral status as animals, plants should not have any moral status. Put in simpler terms: it is not as bad to eat plants than to eat, say, pigs. While there are still uncertainties around comparative moral and policy implications between animals and plants, given a gradualist account of quasi-sentience and partial moral status, both of which we claim are a matter of degree, we may not have to abolish our convictions by declaring that plants have no sentience or moral status at all. Indeed, we can hold two things at the same time: that animals and plants have moral status, but animals have prima facie more moral status than plants.

This paper aims to articulate an anarchist challenge to a widespread assumption in the rapidly growing philosophical literature on models, modeling-practices, and model-based science. I argue that the various entities and practices called “models” and “modeling-practices” are too heterogeneous, too context-sensitive, and serve too many scientific purposes and roles, as to constitute unified scientific phenomena that would allow for useful epistemic and ontologies analyses. Just like Feyerabend once argued that there are no general useful inferences to be drawn about the method of “science”, I argue that the same lesson will apply to “model-based science”, hence calling my view model anarchism.

The study of introspection has, up until now, been predominantly human-centric, with regrettably little attention devoted to the question of whether introspection might exist in non-humans, such as animals and artificial intelligence (AI), and what distinct forms it might take. In their target article, Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) aim to address this oversight by offering a non-anthropocentric framework for understanding introspection that could be used to address these questions. However, their discussions on introspection in animals and AIs were quite brief. In this commentary, we will build on their suggestions to offer some methodological guidance for how future research into introspection in animals and AIs might proceed.

Synthetic meat made from animal cells will transform how we eat. It will reduce suffering by eliminating the need to raise and slaughter animals. But it will also have big public health benefits if it becomes widely consumed. In this paper, we discuss how “clean meat” can reduce the risks associated with intensive animal farming, including antibiotic resistance, environmental pollution, and zoonotic viral diseases like influenza and coronavirus. Since the most common objection to clean meat is that some people find it “disgusting” or “unnatural,” we explore the psychology of disgust to find possible counter-measures. We argue that the public health benefits of clean meat give us strong moral reasons to promote its development and consumption in a way that the public is likely to support. We end by depicting the change from farmed animals to clean meat as a collective action problem and suggest that social norms rather than coercive laws should be employed to solve the problem.

The goal of this article is to bring together two fields of research — animal sentience research and animal welfare science — with the aim of advancing our understanding of animal emotions, especially their subjectively experienced or 'felt' component (feelings). While these two research areas share a common interest in animal feelings, they have had surprisingly little interaction. In this paper, we make a call for the integration of these fields and outline some of the ways in which work done in each of these areas can inform and benefit the other, such as strengthening the theoretical and conceptual bases of both fields, and sharing methods used by each, advocating further future collaboration for the benefit of both disciplines.