“Sentience: From Capacity to Mode of Being”

Abstract: Sentience has become a familiar term when talking about other animals in connection with ethics, not only in philosophy, but also in science, in animal protection laws, and in public discourse. In philosophy literature, sentience has been treated as the ‘capacity’ to feel pleasure and pain. As such, sentience has been invoked as the basis for our moral response to other animals by several capacity-based approaches to animal ethics. On the other hand, it is precisely as a capacity that the relevance of sentience to our moral responses has been rejected by those authors who deny the moral relevance of capacities. In this paper, I will argue that sentience should not be categorized as a capacity, but rather as a mode of being. The upshot is that the significance of sentience for our moral responses can be retained, as it is not affected by serious objections to capacity-based approaches.