Consciousness and Moral Status of Animals

Abstract

Consciousness is the basis for granting moral status, but it is ephemeral and elusive. Both the ontological and epistemic dimension of consciousness cause hard problems for modern science and the philosophy of mind. On the one hand, consciousness is subjective, and includes conscious states with a phenomenal or qualitative character – “qualia”. It consists of mental states which are accessible to a subject only from the first-person perspective. A being is phenomenally conscious when there is something that is like to be that being. Utilitarianism uses the hedonistic strategy of the moral status, ascribing to that the demand for us to treat sentience as the fundamental property for obtaining moral status. Sentience is not the simple reactivity to stimuli, but it is the basic kind of phenomenal consciousness available only from the inside. Interpreting the behaviour of animals, we usually apply to them the intentional stance which induces us to consider animals as if they were rational agents with beliefs and desires. We fill animal minds with the content which we have in our own minds. We project onto animals our own mental world. When we do that we apply the rationalist strategy of moral status granting, assuming that animals are like us and according to their knowledge of the world they pursue their desires in a less or more intelligent way. Stressing the great importance to consciousness as the basis of moral status is, in fact, burdened with anthropomorphism.