{"id":1676,"date":"2022-02-20T16:51:38","date_gmt":"2022-02-20T16:51:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=1676"},"modified":"2022-02-20T17:50:51","modified_gmt":"2022-02-20T17:50:51","slug":"dale-jamieson-on-sentience-and-agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2022\/02\/20\/dale-jamieson-on-sentience-and-agency\/","title":{"rendered":"Dale Jamieson on sentience and \u201cagency\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dale Jamieson<\/a>\u2019s heart is clearly in the right place, both about protecting sentient organisms and about protecting their insentient environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Philosophers call deserving such protection \u201cmeriting moral consideration\u201d (by humans, of course).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dale points out that humans have followed a long circuitous path — from thinking that only humans, with language and intelligence, merit moral consideration, to thinking that all organisms that are sentient (hence can suffer) merit moral consideration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he thinks sentience is not a good enough criterion. \u201cAgency\u201d is required too. What is agency? It is being able to do something deliberately, and not just because you were pushed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what does it mean to be able to do something deliberately? I think it\u2019s being able to do something because you feel like it<\/em> rather than because you were pushed (or at least because you feel like<\/em> you\u2019re doing it because you feel like it). In other words, I think a necessary condition for agency is sentience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thermostats and robots and microbes and plants can be interpreted<\/em> by humans as \u201cagents,\u201d but whether humans are right in their interpretations depends on facts \u2013 facts that, because of the \u201cother-minds problem,\u201d humans can never know for sure: the only one who can know for sure whether a thing feels is the thing itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Would an insentient entity, one that was only capable of certain autonomous actions — such as running away or defending itself if attacked, but never feeling a thing<\/em> \u2013 merit moral consideration? To me, with the animal kill counter<\/a> registering grotesque and ever grandescent numbers of human-inflicted horrors on undeniably sentient nonhuman victims every second of every day, worldwide, it is nothing short of grotesque to be theorizing about \u201cinsentient agency.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Certainty<\/em> about sentience is not necessary, however. We can\u2019t have certainty about sentience even for our fellow human beings. High probability on all available evidence is good enough. But then the evidence for agency depends on the evidence for sentience<\/em>. It is not an independent criterion for moral consideration; just further evidence for sentience. Evidence of independent \u201cchoice\u201d or \u201cdecision-making\u201d or “autonomomy” may count as evidence for \u201cagency,\u201d but without evidence for sentience we are back to thermostats, robots, microbes and plants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In mind-reading others, human and nonhuman, we do have a little help from Darwinian evolution and from \u201cmirror neurons<\/a>\u201d in the brain that are active both when we do something and when another organism, human or nonhuman, does the same thing. These are useful for interacting with our predators (and, if we are carnivores, our prey), as well as with our young, kin, and kind (if we are\u00a0K-selected<\/a>,\u00a0altricial<\/a>\u00a0species who must care for our young, or social species who must maintain family and tribal relationships lifelong).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we need both sentience-detectors and agency-detectors for survival. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But only sentience is needed for moral consideration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dale Jamieson\u2019s heart is clearly in the right place, both about protecting sentient organisms and about protecting their insentient environment. Philosophers call deserving such protection \u201cmeriting moral consideration\u201d (by humans, of course). Dale points out that humans have followed a long circuitous path — from thinking that only humans, with language and intelligence, merit moral … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Dale Jamieson on sentience and \u201cagency\u201d”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[113,114,25,112],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1676"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1679,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions\/1679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}