The moral value of animal sentience and agency (original) (raw)

2021, Fellow Brethren, Slaves and Companions (Human/Animals Relations in Transformation)

Sentience and agency are the two main competing properties for the attribution of moral status in animal ethics and beyond. Those favoring sentience usually subscribe to an approach giving preeminence to welfare as the most important moral currency. By contrast, those grounding moral status in agency give more importance to an individual's autonomy and capacity to act morally. In this chapter, I provide a set of guidelines to navigate the thorny question of choosing between agency or sentience as a basis for moral status in animal ethics (and beyond). I will argue that both options have advantages and limits, and the choice depends on what one wants to do with the idea of moral status. In assessing the merits of each approach, I will critically discuss Singer's equal consideration of interests principle, Regan's egalitarian agency-based account, Cochrane's attempt to ground an inclusive egalitarian approach via sentience, Kagan's limited hierarchy, and McMahan's sentience-based inegalitarian gradualism. I will argue that irrespective of whether we opt for sentience or agency, equality can be meaningfully attributed only to qualified classes of beings because, if it is attributed to very general classes, it suffers from the same problems with the basis of equality as human-based accounts. Hence, a restricted form of egalitarianism seems the only viable possibility that does not violate the minimal requirement of proportionality. But current forms of restricted egalitarianism struggle too to square their (limited) egalitarian commitment with the basis of moral status. Moral status is an elusive notion in animal ethics, as well as more generally in value theory. A status is a comparative value notion, which defines the comparative value of a class of individuals with respect to other classes. If it is to serve normatively, it should be thought of as a shorthand for a set of information that we should have about a being: how to regard it and what do to about it. A moral status should tell us what kind of attitude we should have towards a being and what we are required or permitted to do. In sum, moral status provides us with evaluative and prescriptive information about a being. But this information is not freestanding, as if moral status were a property of