Citation

Author Website

https://philpeople.org/profiles/jonathan-birch

Abstract

We often face grave practical decisions that seem to hinge on whether a system is sentient. This family of cases includes invertebrate animals, people who are unresponsive after brain injury, fetuses, neural organoids, and now AI technologies. We must decide what to do despite ongoing disagreement about the nature of sentience. In our state of uncertainty, we should pragmatically transform the question from “Is it sentient?” to “Is it a sentience candidate, an investigation priority, or neither?”. When a system is a sentience candidate, it is negligent to fail to consider precautions. We should instead evaluate precautions for their proportionality using the “PARC tests”. When we think about the problems in this way, we see that overconfidence about the absence of sentience has repeatedly led decision makers to neglect serious risks. Erring on the side of caution requires many revisions to current practice in many areas of human activity.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License

Author Biography

Jonathan Birch is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at the LSE. In 2021, he led a Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans that shaped the UK's Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022.

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1893