Sentient being

A sentient being is any kind of being capable of conscious experiences of pleasure or pain, also called sentience or the capacity to feel pleasure and pain. The term came into wide use after animal liberation advocate Peter Singer discussed it in his 1975 book Animal Liberation.

From a utilitarian perspective, Singer argues that if an individual feels pain or pleasure—if it is a sentient being—it has interests (in avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure). If it has interests, those interests should be objects of moral consideration, and interests of the same kind should receive equal weight regardless of the species to which the individual belongs (principle of equal consideration). To do otherwise is speciesism.

In this sense, most humans practice speciesism, in ways large and small, in everyday life.

How can we know about animals’ conscious experiences?

Pain and pleasure are subjective conscious experiences. Humans cannot objectively know what conscious experiences another being has. In philosophy of mind, this is called the problem of other minds. We cannot know whether animals or plants feel pain; nor can we know whether other humans feel pain. We merely infer from outward behavior that another individual is probably suffering. Whether another being has conscious experiences identical or similar to mine is one of the questions science can never resolve.

Given this limitation, the best we can do to determine whether a being feels pain is to use “reasoning by analogy” and “inference to the best explanation.” We therefore need to examine similarities and differences in various features that may relate to pain or conscious experience, among humans and organisms evolutionarily close to humans. If a species closely resembles humans in many respects associated with pain or pleasure, this strengthens the view that members of that species also feel pain (reasoning by analogy). Conversely, if similar phenomena are observed in almost none of these features, we should judge pain to be unlikely (inference to the best explanation).

For research conducted from this perspective, see Conscious experiences in various animals and plants.

Articles

• 2024-08-21 - The space of (possibly) sentient beings

See also

• A somewhat different concept from the subject of a life in the rights view.