Find our second Sentientism conversation, focusing on Jeff’s book The Moral Circle, here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast.
Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, Director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. His books include The Moral Circle and Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves and he is co-author of Chimpanzee Rights and Food, Animals, and the Environment.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”
Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.
00:00 Clips
01:20 Welcome
– Our first Sentientist Conversation, episode 26
– Jeff’s book The Moral Circle
– Endorsements from previous Sentientism guests Barbara King and Peter Singer
– Welcome Smokey!
02:50 Jeff’s Intro
– Research and teaching and leading programmes at NYU including the Wild Animal Welfare Programme and the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness
– Asking “How humans can better interact with the non-human world… who might matter, how much might they matter, what might they need, what might we owe them, what follows for our actions and policies and priorities…?”
– Directing the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection “agriculture, farmed animal welfare, #biodiversity, wild animal welfare…”
– Directing the NY Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy “Non-human minds… invertebrates and AI systems”
04:37 The Moral Circle
– JW: “Does it have to be a circle?”
– “I was concerned… it implies that humanity is at the centre and that other beings matter or are closer to the centre to the degree that they resemble us”
– “There are other types of spatial metaphors that could be interesting to explore… a sphere… a cone…”
– “I ultimately decided to stick with the circle… the project was going to be provocative and alienating enough without also switching metaphors on people”
– “The overall question of the book is… which beings might matter…”
– “We right now at least increasingly agree that all humans and many non-human animals… merit consideration”
– “The book asks ‘should we go farther?'”
– “I planned to argue… that we should go quite a bit farther… all vertebrates and many invertebrates and some near-future AI systems in our moral circle…”
– “I surprisingly and distressingly found myself committed by my own arguments to potentially going even farther than that… extending at least a little bit of consideration to plants, fungi, microscopic organisms, maybe even current or very near future AI systems…”
08:32 What Makes Us Matter?
– “There are of course a lot of secular and religious philosophical worldviews about the basis for moral standing”
– Sentience, the ability to experience positive and negative states?
– Consciousness, even without the positive or negative?
– Agency, even without consciousness (setting and pursuing own goals based on cognitive states that function like beliefs and desires)
– “We might have our own view about that debate. I, like you, lean towards the sentience view that sentience is both necessary and sufficient for moral standing”
– “Given how difficult these issues are… smart people disagree… smart people have been confidently wrong in conveniently exclusionary ways… we need to be making these decisions together in the context of ongoing disagreement…”
– “Accepting at least a weakly pluralistic view is valuable… I ought to give at least a little bit of weight to other reasonable views… and explore their implications as well… in the spirit of caution and humility and collaboration in the context of disagreement and uncertainty.”
11:39 Why is Sentience Important?
– “You need to be able to have feelings or experiences that feel good or bad to you… in order for it to matter to you what happens to you and in order for it to matter to you what happens in the world”
– If “nothing feels good or bad [for an entity]… I have a hard time imagining that there are stakes for that individual in what happens to them or what happens to the world”
– “Robust agency but without consciousness… can pursue goals… I… have a hard time imagining that it really matters to that being… that they achieve their goals.”
– “Sentience… We are not only talking about bodily pleasures and pains… We are talking about any conscious experience… that feels good or bad in any way shape or form… bodily… emotional or intellectual… anything that you like or dislike… would be enough to make you a sentient being”
– “That is when, for me, it starts to feel intuitively plausible that there is an intrinsic moral significance that I have a responsibility to consider”
– “The agency view will claim those [care] concepts too… An agent is a being with a capacity for belief and desire and intention and care and concerns. But we can imagine a being who has all of those functional, behavioural capacities and sets and pursues goals… has those goals achieved or not… those goals satisfied or not without being conscious at all… without feeling like those goals need to be pursued”
– “The debate between the sentientist and the agency theorist is not about whether moral standing depends on you valuing things but is rather about what it takes to ‘value things’ in the relevant sense, the morally significant sense”
– The Nico Delon Sentientism episode
– “We are both sentient and agentic as humans… for us, we experience the value of our desires and goals through our consciousness… of course it seems plausible to us that consciousness is an important ingredient in the significance of our goals and desires and agency… But we have to allow for the possibility… that there could be some kind of intrinsic value in pure robust agency stripped of consciousness”
19:16 What About Zero-Valence Consciousness?
– David Chalmer’s Broad Sentientism (any consciousness) vs. Narrow Sentientism (only valenced, good or bad, consciousness)
– Imagining Vulcans as conscious but not sentient beings with zero valence – no good or bad
– Sentience: “Not only does it feel like something to be you but it can be good or bad”
– “I have some bad news for you… We are not able to avoid philosophy of mind if we focus on sentience instead of consciousness… if anything we have to do more philosophy of mind because now we have to think not only about the conditions for consciousness… but also about the conditions for valence and about how consciousness and valence need to be connected in order to add up to sentience… that is not a trivial step.”
– “We might be able to presume that all animals who are conscious are also sentient because we share an evolutionary history… have a bodily ability to detect helpful and harmful stimuli that they use for survival purposes…”
– “But when we think about designs for AI systems… we might observe that they have many of the ingredients for consciousness architecturally and computationally… they have an ability to detect helpful and harmful stimuli… but we then have to ask are those hooked up in a way that could plausibly add up to conscious experiences that feel good or bad… the science… and the philosophy… is pretty impoverished… if anything we have more work to do.”
– “The Vulcans… I am not persuaded by this kind of thought experiment… I share the intuition… however I think we can explain that intuition while still affirming the idea that sentience… is a necessary condition for moral standing…”
– “When I try to imagine this [Vulcan] being I am imagining someone who is conscious… and robustly agentic, setting and pursuing their own goals… I have a very hard time intuitively disentangling the idea of a conscious and agentic being from the idea of a conscious and sentient and agentic being.”
– “I have a very hard time imagining someone who consciously is having desires and preferences and setting and pursuing goals and having them be satisfied and frustrated without having any kind of bodily or emotional or intellectual positive or negative experience”
– Virtue or care ethical concerns “Similar to what Kant argued about animals… Even if someone lacks sentience… once they look and act exactly like a sentient being… I might have a responsibility to treat them as though they matter simply as a way of cultivating a disposition to express respect and compassion and care towards beings who function and behave in this kind of way in order to train myself, prime myself for treating actually sentient beings with the right kind of care.”
– The Josh Gellers Sentientism episode and hybrid or relational approaches that challenge the properties approach (assessing properties of an entity to determine moral significance)
– “It is true that we are asking and answering these questions from an anthropocentric perspective… we do have this history of going through a list of properties… capacities that we ourselves possess… and then deciding, one at a time ‘this is the one that matters… no this is the one that matters… you need to be a certain kind of human… you need to be a human in general… a linguistic and rational being… a sentient being…’ That is part of a troubling pattern where we just keep picking a slightly broader… capacity that is central to our experience of our own significance…”
– “That should give us pause… is there a way around it… not necessarily… we are interacting with these beings… our own human perspective is inescapable… we have to do the best we can to ask who might matter and what we might owe them… from our human perspective notwithstanding the bias and ignorance that we are increasingly becoming aware of.”
– “I think that the better proposal would be to combine a properties view with a relational view… That would be important even for the relational view… If you think that relationships of various kinds are what matter for morality you need to think at least a little bit about properties and capacities in order to understand what kinds of relationships are at stake.”
– “Whether you have bonds of care… depends in part on whether you have the individual capacity to experience affection for another being…”
– “Whether you have a certain kind of bond of vulnerability or power or control over the vulnerable depends in part on whether they have capacities that render them vulnerable”
– “Josh and others are right to point out our troubling history… the importance of relationships at least in practical ethics… however… [it would be] wrong… to think that that can be a replacement for or an alternative to a good faith assessment of what capacities or properties might matter and who might have them… we have no way out but through… we should just study that as carefully as possible”
– Degrees of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. “The more we look to capacities of ours that are more widely shared, the more that does induce a kind of humbler orientation to our own place in the moral universe and that is helpful.”
– “It could be possible to go broader still… agency without sentience or life without agency… then we would be humbler still… an even broader moral universe where humanity is even less significant relatively speaking”
– “The relational view is susceptible to its own critique of the properties view… we are a particular kind of being… casting judgement on other kinds of minds and other kinds of relationships through our own experience… However I would not say that this problem exists more for the relational view than for the properties view…”
– Feminist care ethics: “It is not ultimately up to us which relationships matter… Patterns of power and oppression… are another morally significant kind… when you wield power over someone… that gives you certain responsibilities towards them whether you like it or not.”
– “We are all stuck in the same predicament here”
38:10 So Who Matters?
– Are Roombas and thermostats agents? How far across biology and development and even substrates does sentience go?
– “The ethics of risk and uncertainty… we should be somewhat ecumenical and pluralistic both about the facts and about the values in light of ongoing substantial disagreement and uncertainty”
– “When it comes to our own decision-making in everyday life we should extend at least some moral consideration [to]… every being who has at least a realistic, non-negligible, non-trivial chance of mattering”
– Ethical uncertainty re: sentience / agency / consciousness
– Scientific uncertainty re: “what it takes to possess each of those capacities… to be conscious do you need to have a brain… or is it enough to have a sophisticated cognitive system with broadly analogous capacities for perception, attention, learning, memory, self-awareness, social awareness… or is it enough to have even a simpler cognitive system… process information or represent objects in your environment?”
– “These are contested issues… we are not on the cusp of some secure theory of moral standing or some secure theory of consciousness about which everyone can feel certain at the same time.”
– “We should try to make progress… in the meantime we have a responsibility to exercise caution”
– “When we take that approach… you realise ‘Oh wow, if the bar for at least minimal moral consideration is not definitely… or probably… but rather possibly they matter… then it turns out a lot of beings meet that standard’”.
– “In my view, unfortunately, that definitely includes all vertebrates, many invertebrates including insects and at least some near-future AI systems. And possibly it also includes plants, fungi, microscopic organisms… it gets surprising and provocative and where the implications get confusing.”
43:28 Do AIs Matter?
– “Fortunately we can use broadly the same kind of methodology to assess animals and AI systems for evidence of sentience, consciousness, agency… but the details do have to differ”
– “Marker or indicator methods… You can start by introspecting to tell the difference between conscious processing and non-conscious processing… between when I feel pain vs. having an unfelt nociceptive response (an unfelt detection of noxious stimuli)… then examine what types of behaviour and anatomical properties are associated with conscious processing… then go look for broadly similar… properties in non-humans”
– “With other animals we look not only for whether they have the same brain and body structures… also do they nurse their own wounds… respond to analgesics and anti-depressants… make behavioural trade-offs between the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of other goals…”
– “Proof and certainty are not available without a secure theory of consciousness… but it does count as evidence. It increases the probability of consciousness.”
– “With AI systems we are not able at present to trust that same kind of behavioural evidence… we lack the kinds of anatomical and evolutionary continuities”
– “We might be able to develop AI systems whose behaviours are stronger evidence… Even at present… we can look underneath their potentially misleading behaviours for underlying architectural evidence that they have computational properties associated with perception, attention, learning, memory, self-awareness, social awareness, language, reason, flexible decision making, a kind of global work space that coordinates activity across these modules”
– “That might not be proof but it can at least count as evidence”
– “What we find right now is that there is not all that much evidence of consciousness or sentience… in current large language models…”
– “…But there are also no clear technical barriers towards the development of AI systems in the very near future with advanced and integrated versions of all of these capabilities”
– “And there are a lot of incentives for AI companies and governments to race towards the creation of exactly those kinds of AI systems because many of the same capabilities associated with consciousness are also associated with intelligence…”
– “We might accidentally create consciousness in the course of trying to create intelligence”
48:47 Do Photons Matter?
– How do different philosophies of mind affect our moral scope? (panpsychism, illusionism, materialism, functionalism, eliminativism?)
– “I was setting out in writing my book to argue for at least some moral consideration for all vertebrates and many invertebrates and at least some advanced, near-future AI systems… then I found myself convinced by my own arguments to go much farther… this… is among the reasons why.”
– “Many philosophers agree that consciousness is itself sufficient for moral standing and many philosophers agree that consciousness is a basic property of all matter… the panpsychist view”
– “…other permissive views… consciousness is a basic property of any information processing system of a certain sort or any representational system of a certain sort”
– “As long as you have a non-negligible credence… that by itself will establish a non-negligible chance of moral significance in a truly astonishing number of beings… even microscopic particles… We gotta take that seriously!”
– “Around 7% of professional philosophers accepting or leaning towards panpsychism about consciousness… We should not dismiss that as a serious view.”
– Previous Sentientism episodes on panpsychism with Luke Roelofs, David Pearce, Emerson Green
– JW: “Maybe electrons and photons have some minimal micro-consciousness, but if it’s hard to imagine how a photon could feel something good or bad then maybe they’re a micro-consciousness that is not sentient and maybe only macro-consciousnesses are sentient…”
– “There are all kinds of further arguments we can make to reassure ourselves that we do not, at present, have a responsibility to allocate all our resources to electron welfare”
– “… they might not have the kinds of agency or detection of helpful and harmful stimuli that then allows for valence… they might fall below the threshold.”
– The combination theory challenge for panpsychism “What it takes for these minimally conscious particles to come together in a way that allows the whole structure to have consciousness as well”
– “You can be a panpsychist who thinks that there is at least minimal consciousness in particles while also thinking that it takes a very special kind of combination for objects composed out of particles to be conscious… and then further special properties required for valence and sentience…”
– “We should not dismiss out of hand the possibility that… there might be some kind of responsibility owed, even to particles…”
56:15 Do Future Beings Matter?
– “I do think that we have a responsibility to all stakeholders affected by our actions and policies… ‘all stakeholders’ is a property claim, all individuals who are vulnerable in a certain kind of way… ‘affected’… is a relational remark…”
– “We need to have a certain kind of causal relationship with these vulnerable beings in order to have a responsibility to consider them and to consider our impacts on them”
– “There can be some spatial and temporal boundaries for the moral circle… not based on the intrinsic properties of particular beings, but rather based on our own causal interactions… relationships with them… our ability to predict and control our causal impacts on them…”
– “We have at least a minimal ability to make educated guesses about our impacts on a pretty vast number and wide range of beings… locally and globally… at present and in the future… if we invest… we could improve our ability to predict and control our direct and indirect impacts…”
– “Even right now… we ought to consider our impacts on, for example, many future non-humans”
– “We also ought to specifically invest in improving our ability… so that me can more reliably predict and control our impacts on even larger numbers…”
– JW: Nearly all humans already care about some non-human sentients and some future beings… we’re just asking them to care consistently about them all
– Making sensible distinctions: “We can be more confident that mammals and birds are sentient and conscious… than that other vertebrates and many invertebrates are sentient and conscious. We can be more confident about our ability to predict and control our impacts on the next generation and the generation after that than on… individuals living in other galaxies in future millennia”
– “Even if we acknowledge that everyone intrinsically matters equally in the sense that everyone merits equal consideration of interests… we might nevertheless think that we ought to apply a discount rate across species or across space and time in virtue of our own limited knowledge and our own limited ability to predict and control the impacts of our policies on these beings.”
– “That does not totally eliminate the need to consider your impacts on, for example, distant future non-humans. It might just mean you can give them a little less weight… you still might need to give them a lot of weight overall and that can still make a really big difference for your decisions today.”
01:01:51 How Much Do They Matter?
– “This presumption of human equality is this hard fought, partial victory… not everyone agrees… we are always at risk of backsliding”
– “This idea… that all humans are equal… notwithstanding how smart and strong they are… membership of particular morally arbitrary social and biological categories… that is a really big deal. This idea of reintroducing ranking and hierarchy into the moral community feels really fraught against that background.”
– “At the same time, if we refuse to allow for any kind of ranking or hierarchy… then we are literally flipping a coin… if I can either save you or a fruit fly…”
– “There is this lurking concern about ableism and ageism and these other human oppressions and forms of prejudice and discrimination”
– “If you think that individuals with… a more complex brain or greater capacity for language and reason matter more – does that mean some humans matter more than others… lifespan… does that mean younger humans matter more than older humans
– Shelly Kagan’s approach: presume equality within species but differentiation between them “tries to have it both ways… on practical realist grounds”
– “I am not really coming down one way or another in this debate… instead my interest is in rejecting human exceptionalism – this idea that humanity always matters most and always takes priority, both individually and collectively”
– “No matter what, human exceptionalism is in trouble… if you go egalitarian… all those fruit flies are obviously going to matter more than us… if you get into the business of ranking… fine, I might matter more than an individual fruit fly, but a sufficiently large number of individual fruit flies will matter more than me… and… there could be much more sophisticated AI systems… they might end up mattering more than we do”
– “Rights theorists are going to face this kind of difficulty too… Everybody needs to confront the question of whether everyone matters equally or some beings matter more than others”
– Varieties of rights theory: “Rights trumping any welfare stakes no matter how great… Others conceive of rights as trumping welfare stakes up to a certain point… a kind of threshold approach to rights”
– “If you go the threshold view then you might think that the threshold where rights become violable could vary from species to species or substrate to substrate based on their welfare capacities or their moral worth”
– “If your view is that I have a right to life which means you should not kill me to save 5 people, but maybe you should kill me to save a thousand people or a million people… Now imagine that I matter a million times more than an ant… Does that mean that you should divide by a million to figure out what the threshold is for being permitted to kill an ant?”
– “…we should accept a pluralist view in practice, not only about who matters but also about what we owe them… moral uncertainty – I could be wrong… collaboration – we need to work together in spite of disagreement… We need to draw insights from other moral theories”
– “Even if I accept utilitarianism… maximise happiness and minimise suffering… the way to be a good utilitarian is not to go around asking… how to maximise happiness and minimise suffering… The way to be a good utilitarian is to broadly speaking set good goals in life… select social and professional roles that will give you a platform for pursuing those goals… then… trying to respect rights… cultivate virtuous character traits… cultivate caring relationships… build just and fair social structures… that is the way to be a good utilitarian! Being a good rights theorist and virtue theorist and care theorist in the context of the goals that you intend to pursue in your life.”
– “We should indeed accept a robust set of rights… as a kind of check against bias and self-serving attempts to use risk/benefit analysis and expected utility reasoning in everyday life”
– JW: Non-maleficence as a potential pluralistic minimal moral obligation? “Pluralism, yes, but there’s still a solid foundation”
01:14:44 The Role of Epistemology?
– Souls, divine command theory, ahimsa?
– “A commitment to using evidence and reason to the best of our ability… is important for being a good person and leaving good impacts on the world”
– “However, that kind of commitment to evidence and reason is compatible with having religious or secular foundational views about metaphysics”
– “You and I could both be committed to following the evidence, exercising our capacity for reason… I could think it all bottoms out in a creator deity who placed us in this predicament and you could think it all bottoms out in the big bang and the laws of nature… but we can still be committed to Sentientism… harm reduction… risk mitigation… evidence and reason in the pursuit of those goals”
– “The Sentientism community should be regarded as a sufficiently big tent so that it can include people who think sentience is necessary, people who think agency is sufficient… utilitarians and rights theorists and it should include religious and secular folks as long as they are all committed to those basic presuppositions: sentience is at least sufficient and to the best of our ability we ought to go about engaging in harm reduction and risk mitigation… cultivate states of character and build social structures that can feed into that collaborative effort.”
– “If religious folks want to get involved in that I welcome them”
– “In the fullness of time… I would really want the pluralism to include religious worldviews too”
01:18:26 A Better Future?
– “The key is really accepting our responsibilities and limitations in equal measure”
– “We owe a lot to the non-human world but we also have profound limitations on our knowledge and our capacity and on our political will”
– “Combining a radical aspiration towards egalitarianism and inclusion… as a long term goal… but then also a quite moderate and incrementalist theory of change, a way of making change towards that goal”
– “Work towards a future where we can extend as much consideration and allocate as many resources as possible to all of the non-humans who might matter… but we also have to work within our limitations.”
– “In the first instance, in this generation, seeking low cost, low hanging fruit, co-beneficial policies for humans and non-humans and the environment.”
– “Food systems… what kinds of incremental informational and financial and regulatory and just transition policies can nudge us in the direction of a plant-based food system in a sustainable way”
– “Infrastructure… as we make cities and other human communities more resilient in the face of climate change… how can they be safer for humans and animals and the environment at the same time… bird-safe glass… wildlife corridors…”
– “AI… how can we find approaches to AI safety and AI welfare that are good for humans and AI systems and the environment at the same time… collaborative rather than adversarial ways of achieving AI safety and AI alignment.”
– “That allows us to make incremental progress… but it builds momentum in the right direction… opportunities to collect that knowledge and that power and that political will… allows us to go a little bit farther in each new generation”
– “I do want to hold on to these radical goals… then allow each generation to make a little more progress… then discover… where to go next… how far we can get… rather than prejudging from the outset”
01:22: 33 Follow Jeff:
– “The Moral Circle“
– Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (now open access and free to read!)
Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop.