Sentience, agency, and animal status

Andrzej Elżanowski

Chapter 6 in Research Handbook on Animal Law and Animal Rights, 2025, pp 115-140 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The origin of consciousness and sentience as two aspects of the same process is presented together with a new managerial theory of consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is a general adaptation that evolved independently among the vertebrates, mollusks, and arthropods. The origin of consciousness with sentience marks a major ontological break between most organisms as living objects and the subjects or agents with their own minds and individual interests, which grant these animals basic moral rights in their relations with moral agents. Basic moral rights are shared by personal and non-personal agents, both having comparable intrinsic values of their individual lives. The lives of personal agents, especially humans, differ from those of non-personal agents in having potentially higher extrinsic values, which can be positive, none, or negative. There is, therefore, no reason to assume a priori the value of a personal or a human life to be higher than the value of a non-personal life.

Keywords: Consciousness; Sentience; Non-personal agency; Intrinsic; Extrinsic value of a life; Moral rights; Responsibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035324873
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