![]() This issue in fact lies at the heart of current controversies regarding sentience, to which we will now turn. This is an illicit inference, given the evidence from humans that some affect is unconscious (Berridge & Winkielman, 2003 Paul et al., 2020). In Dawkins' view, animal welfare scientists have tended to grossly underestimate the difficulties of studying subjective experience in animals: having found evidence of an affective state, they immediately jump to the conclusion that the state is consciously experienced, without making any serious case for this. Notably, Dawkins ( 2012, 2017, 2021) has argued for a conception of welfare in which sentience plays no role. But not all animal welfare scientists are in agreement on this point. Scientists in this area often take it for granted that, in studying welfare, the goal is to access (albeit indirectly) experienced affective states (e.g. The concept of sentience (usually in the narrower sense) also features in animal welfare science. This legislative role has imbued debates about which animals are sentient (and which are not) with a sense of practical urgency - and it is generally the capacity to have valenced experiences that is at issue in these debates. In 2019, the Australian Capital Territory passed amendments to its Animal Welfare Act 1992 to formally recognise that ‘animals are sentient beings that are able to subjectively feel and perceive the world around them’ (s4A(1a)), which has influenced other states to discuss implementing similar changes. New Zealand's Animal Welfare Act 1999 contains an opening clause to ‘recognise that animals are sentient’ (a(i)). Quebec's Animal Welfare and Safety Act begins by noting that animals ‘are sentient beings that have biological needs’ (B-3.1, p.1). The UK's Animal Welfare Act 2006 defines ‘animal’ as ‘a vertebrate other than man’, but adds that invertebrates could be brought within the scope of the Act ‘if the appropriate national authority is satisfied, on the basis of scientific evidence, that animals of the kind concerned are capable of experiencing pain or suffering’ (s1(4)). The EU's Lisbon Treaty states that member states ‘shall, since animals are sentient beings, pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals’ (Article 13, Title 2). ![]() In recent decades, this concept of sentience has also come to carry great significance for animal welfare law in the UK, European Union (EU), Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Empirical work also suggests many non-philosophers also see the capacity for subjective experience as one factor (though not the only factor) justifying attributions of moral standing (Goodwin, 2015 Jack & Robbin, 2012 Sytsma & Machery 2012). This remains a popular view in animal ethics (DeGrazia, 1996 Varner, 2012). Singer ( 1979) defines sentience as ‘the capacity to suffer or experience enjoyment or happiness’ and clearly takes this capacity to be both necessary and sufficient for the possession of morally significant interests. This idea goes back to Bentham's iconic dictum: ‘the question is not Can they reason? or Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ (Bentham, 1789). It is often said to be a ground, or even the ground, for moral status. The capacity to have valenced experiences has a special significance for ethics. Accordingly, sentience in this narrower sense is sometimes also known as ‘affective sentience’ (Powell & Mikhalevich, 2021) and is very close to one important sense of the ordinary word ‘feeling’ (Harnad, 2016). In our own case, many of these experiences involve a mix of sensory, affective, and cognitive components (e.g., pain involves a sensation of injury at a specific location and an accompanying negative affect Auvray et al., 2010), but it is the affective component of these experiences that makes them feel bad or feel good (Shriver, 2018). In a narrower sense, sentience can refer to the capacity to have subjective experiences with positive or negative valence - experiences that feel bad or feel good - such as pain, pleasure, anxiety, distress, boredom, hunger, thirst, pleasure, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement (e.g. when it is fully awake), there is ‘something it's like’ to be that animal. An animal is sentient in this sense if, at least under the right conditions (e.g. In a broad sense, sentience can refer to the capacity for any type of subjective experience: any capacity for what philosophers tend to call ‘phenomenal consciousness’ (Block, 1995 Nagel, 1974). There are broader and narrower senses of the term. Sentience (from the Latin sentire, to feel) is an important concept in animal ethics, bioethics, and the science and policy of animal welfare.
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