Jonathan Birch

The sense of fairness is a central aspect of human moral psychology. Intuitions about fairness lead to many widespread moral beliefs, such as the belief that the punishment should fit the crime or the belief that one deserves a fair share of what one has earned. In The Origins of Fairness, Nicolas Baumard sets out to shed light on the evolutionary origin of these intuitions. He argues that the human sense of fairness is innate and universal, and he offers an account of its evolution that highlights the role of bargaining in early human “cooperation markets.”

Could emotions be a uniquely human phenomenon? One prominent theory in emotion science, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Theory of Constructed Emotion (tce), suggests they might be. The source of the sceptical challenge is that tce links emotions to abstract concepts tracking socio-normative expectations, and other animals are unlikely to have such concepts. Barrett’s own response to the sceptical challenge is to relativize emotion to the perspective of an interpreter, but this is unpromising. A more promising response may be to amend the theory, dropping the commitment to the abstract nature of emotion concepts and allowing that, like olfactory concepts, they have disjunctive sensory groundings. Even if other animals were emotionless, this would not imply they lack morally significant interests. Unconceptualized valenced experiences are a sufficient basis for morally significant interests, and such experiences may occur even in the absence of discrete, constructed emotions.

It would be unwise to dismiss the possibility of human brain organoids developing sentience. However, scepticism about this idea is appropriate when considering current organoids. It is a point of consensus that a brain-dead human is not sentient, and current organoids lack a functioning brainstem. There are nonetheless troubling early warning signs, suggesting organoid research may create forms of sentience in the near future. To err on the side of caution, researchers with very different views about the neural basis of sentience should unite behind the “brainstem rule”: if a neural organoid develops or innervates a functioning brainstem that regulates arousal and leads to sleep-wake cycles, then it is a sentience candidate. If organoid research leads to the creation of sentience candidates, a moratorium or indefinite ban on the creation of the relevant type of organoid may be appropriate. A different way forward, more consistent with existing approaches to animal research, would be to require ethical review and harm-benefit analysis for all research on sentience candidates.

Martha Nussbaum’s _Justice for Animals_ calls upon humanity to secure for all sentient beings the central capabilities they need to flourish. This essay review critically examines the ethical and scientific foundations of Nussbaum’s position. On the ethical side, we explore the tension between a robust defence of animal rights and political liberalism, which requires tolerance of a range of reasonable views. On the scientific side, we reflect on how our uncertainty regarding the distribution of sentience in the natural world leaves us uncertain about how many claimants of justice there are and about the relative strength of their claims. We bring out some further problems with Nussbaum’s views on animal killing and pest control. We also reflect on how animal welfare science might be done differently if guided by Nussbaum’s framework.

Some patients, following brain injury, do not outwardly respond to spoken commands, yet show patterns of brain activity that indicate responsiveness. This is 'cognitive-motor dissociation' (CMD). Recent research has used machine learning to diagnose CMD from electroencephalogram recordings. These techniques have high false discovery rates, raising a serious problem of inductive risk. It is no solution to communicate the false discovery rates directly to the patient's family, because this information may confuse, alarm and mislead. Instead, we need a procedure for generating case-specific probabilistic assessments that can be communicated clearly. This article constructs a possible procedure with three key elements: (1) A shift from categorical 'responding or not' assessments to degrees of evidence; (2) The use of patient-centred priors to convert degrees of evidence to probabilistic assessments; and (3) The use of standardised probability yardsticks to convey those assessments as clearly as possible.

Definitions of animal welfare often invoke consciousness or sentience. Marian Stamp Dawkins has argued that to define animal welfare this way is a mistake. In Dawkins’s alternative view, an animal with good welfare is one that is healthy and “has what it wants.” The dispute highlights a source of strain on the concept of animal welfare: consciousness-involving definitions are better able to capture the normative significance of welfare, whereas consciousness-free definitions facilitate the validation of welfare indicators. I reflect on how the field should respond to this strain, ultimately recommending against splitting the concept and in favor of consciousness-involving definitions.

We consider the relationship between neural and behavioural evidence for animal consciousness. We critically examine two recent studies: one neural and one behavioural. The first, on crows, finds different neural activity depending on whether a stimulus is reported as seen or unseen. However, to implicate this neural activity in consciousness, we must assume that a specific conditioned behaviour is a report of conscious experience. The second study, on macaques, records behaviours strikingly similar to patterns of conscious and unconscious perception in humans. However, confounds are only ruled out in human subjects, presupposing substantial neural similarity between humans and macaques. Taken together, the two studies reveal a sense in which neural and behavioural research rely on each other. Looking ahead, these two types of evidence could prove to be either mutually reinforcing or mutually undermining. The science of animal consciousness needs both neural and behavioural evidence, ideally obtained as part of a single coordinated programme.

‘Sentience’ sometimes refers to the capacity for any type of subjective experience, and sometimes to the capacity to have subjective experiences with a positive or negative valence, such as pain or pleasure. We review recent controversies regarding sentience in fish and invertebrates and consider the deep methodological challenge posed by these cases. We then present two ways of responding to the challenge. In a policy-making context, precautionary thinking can help us treat animals appropriately despite continuing uncertainty about their sentience. In a scientific context, we can draw inspiration from the science of human consciousness to disentangle conscious and unconscious perception (especially vision) in animals. Developing better ways to disentangle conscious and unconscious affect is a key priority for future research.

Sentience is the capacity to have feelings, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement. It is not simply the capacity to feel pain, but feelings of pain, distress or harm, broadly understood, have a special significance for animal welfare law. Drawing on over 300 scientific studies, we evaluate the evidence of sentience in two groups of invertebrate animals: the cephalopod molluscs or, for short, cephalopods (including octopods, squid and cuttlefish) and the decapod crustaceans or, for short, decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish). We also evaluate the potential welfare implications of current commercial practices involving these animals.

This is a response to the nine commentaries on our target article “Unlimited Associative Learning: A primer and some predictions”. Our responses are organized by theme rather than by author. We present a minimal functional architecture for Unlimited Associative Learning that aims to tie to together the list of capacities presented in the target article. We explain why we discount higher-order thought theories of consciousness. We respond to the criticism that we have overplayed the importance of learning and underplayed the importance of spatial modelling. We decline the invitation to add a negative marker to our proposed positive marker so as to rule out consciousness in plants, but we nonetheless maintain that there is no positive evidence of consciousness in plants. We close by discussing how UAL relates to development and to its material substrate.

In this BA dissertation, I deploy examples of non-causal explanations of physical phenomena as evidence against the view that causal models of explanation can fully account for explanatory practices in science. I begin by discussing the problems faced by Hempel’s models and the causal models built to replace them. I then offer three everyday examples of non-causal explanation, citing sticks, pilots and apples. I suggest a general form for such explanations, under which they can be phrased as inductive-statistical arguments incorporating plausible assumptions. I then show the applicability of this form to explanatory practices in thermal physics. I explore the possibility that population genetics provides a similar form of explanation, and offer a novel defence of the statistical interpretation of population genetics proposed by Matthen and Ariew (2002). I close with remarks concerning how, when faced with competing causal and non-causal explanations of the same phenomenon, we can perform an Inference to the Best Explanation.

This MPhil dissertation presents a novel account of teleological explanations in biology. I outline the “shorthand approach” to such explanations, on which they are taken to convey implicit evolutionary explanations. “Selected effects” accounts of teleological explanation dominate recent literature, but they struggle to accommodate teleological explanations of complex traits built through cumulative selection. I articulate the general notion of a landscape explanation, which, applied to biology, explains the evolution of complex features in a population by citing salient features of the population’s fitness landscape. I show that such explanations lend themselves to a teleological shorthand. I close with remarks concerning when a teleological explanation of a trait is legitimate, and why teleological language strikes us as appropriate when we give evolutionary explanations.

When faced with an urgent and credible threat of grave harm, we should take proportionate precautions. But what is it for a precaution to be “proportionate”? I construct a pragmatic analysis of consisting of four tests—permissibility-in-principle, adequacy, reasonable necessity and consistency—that could realistically be applied by a citizens’ assembly meeting online or in person. I apply these tests retrospectively to two examples from the COVID-19 pandemic—border closures and school closures—arguing that my account captures the key questions on which it is both feasible and important to integrate expert input with democratic input. I then consider how we might try to manage the risk of future pandemics in a proportionate way.

I briefly present and motivate a ‘skill hypothesis’ regarding the evolution of human normative cognition. On this hypothesis, the capacity to internally represent action-guiding norms evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of standardizing, learning and teaching complex motor skills and craft skills, especially skills related to toolmaking. We have an evolved cognitive architecture for internalizing norms of technique, which was then co-opted for a rich array of social functions. There was a gradual expansion of the normative domain, with ritual playing an important role in bridging the gap between concrete, enacted norms and general, abstract norms, such as kinship norms. I conclude by stating nine predictions arising from the skill hypothesis.