Materialism and the Moral Status of Animals

Philosophical Quarterly 72 (4):795-815 (2022)
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Abstract

Consciousness has an important role in ethics: when a being consciously experiences the frustration or satisfaction of its interests, those interests deserve higher moral priority than those of a behaviourally similar but non-conscious being. I consider the relationship between this ethical role and an a posteriori (or “type-B”) materialist solution to the mind-body problem. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, if type-B materialism is correct, then the reference of the concept of phenomenal consciousness is radically indeterminate between a neuronal-level property that is distinctive to mammals and a high-level functional property that is much more widely shared. This would leave many non-mammalian animals (such as birds, fish, insects and octopuses) with indeterminate moral status. There are ways to manage this radical moral indeterminacy, but all of these ways lead to profoundly troubling consequences.

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Jonathan Birch
London School of Economics

Citations of this work

Understanding Artificial Agency.Leonard Dung - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
Preserving the Normative Significance of Sentience.Leonard Dung - 2024 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 31 (1):8-30.
Reasons to Respond to AI Emotional Expressions.Rodrigo Díaz & Jonas Blatter - 2025 - American Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1):87-102.

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References found in this work

The Meta-Problem of Consciousness.David J. Chalmers - 2018 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 25 (9-10):6-61.
The character of consciousness.David John Chalmers - 2010 - New York: Oxford University Press.
On a confusion about a function of consciousness.Ned Block - 1995 - Brain and Behavioral Sciences 18 (2):227-–247.
Animal Liberation.Peter Singer (ed.) - 1977 - Avon Books.

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