WBI Studies Repository (WellBeing International)

We agree with Mikhalevich & Powell but take issue with their criteria for attributing sentience. This problem is connected with difficult issues concerning moral comparisons and evaluating moral decisions when interspecific moral interests conflict

Forber, Patrick

Jones, Robert C

Forber, Patrick and Jones, Robert C (2020) Spineless and sentient: a challenge 
for moral comparison. Animal Sentience 29(30) 
DOI: 10.51291/2377-7478.1606 
This article has appeared in the journal Animal Sentience, 
a peer-reviewed journal on animal cognition and feeling. It 
has been made open access, free for all, by WellBeing 
International and deposited in the WBI Studies 
Repository. For more information, please contact 
wbisr-info@wellbeingintl.org. 
Animal Sentience 2020.359:  Forber & Jones on Mikhailovich & Powell on Invertebrate Minds 
1 
 
Spineless and sentient: a challenge for moral comparison 
Commentary on Mikhalevich & Powell on Invertebrate Minds 
 
 
Patrick Forber 
Department of Philosophy, Tufts University 
Robert C. Jones 
Department of Philosophy, California State University, Dominguez Hills 
 
 
Abstract:  We agree with Mikhalevich & Powell but take issue with their criteria for attributing 
sentience. This problem is connected with difficult issues concerning moral comparisons and 
evaluating moral decisions when interspecific moral interests conflict. 
 
 
Patrick Forber, Associate Professor of 
Philosophy at Tufts University, has published 
extensively in philosophy and biology journals 
about evidence, adaptationism, game theory, 
and social behavior.  Website 
 
 
Robert C. Jones, Associate Professor of 
Philosophy at California State University, 
Dominguez Hills, co-author of Chimpanzee 
Rights (Routledge 2018), has published on 
animal ethics, animal cognition and food ethics 
and has given over fifty talks on animal rights.  
Website 
 
Mikhalevich & Powell (2020) (M&P) present an interesting argument for reconsidering our moral 
attitudes towards invertebrates. It leans on (a) recent empirical research about the cognitive 
capabilities of invertebrates, (b) philosophical concerns about the heterogeneity of 
invertebrates, and (c) human biases in assessing the strange ways of invertebrate life. We largely 
agree with M&P but have a concern about measuring welfare and weighing conflicting interests 
in moral calculations, especially regarding some invertebrates. 
1.  How to attribute sentience?  M&P make a clear declaration about the circumstances under 
which attributing sentience is justified: 
"Until we have a fully worked out and empirically corroborated theory of the relationships 
among neural tissue, cognitive processes, and phenomenology, we are not in a position to rule 
out or even deem unlikely the possibility that tiny brains can give rise to sentient lives with 
interests that merit moral protection."  
Let us call this the “Theoretical and Empirical Requirement of Sentience Attribution" (TERSA). We 
agree that ruthless application of Occam’s razor to eliminate mental states and sentience in 
Animal Sentience 2020.359:  Forber & Jones on Mikhailovich & Powell on Invertebrate Minds 
2 
 
nonhuman animals should be resisted but we think TERSA is (i) too demanding and a (ii) a double-
edged sword. 
(i) TERSA is too demanding. The scientific community does not even have a consensus 
theory of sentience for humans, the great apes, or cetaceans, let alone cephalopods or 
insects. Surely we can make inferences about the (non) existence and nature of mental 
states of nonhumans without demanding such consensus. M&P would probably agree. 
But the real problem with using TERSA as a sort of benchmark is that it can cut both ways. 
(ii) TERSA is a double-edged sword. Consider a converse version of the thesis, TERSA-
minus: “Until we have a fully worked out and empirically corroborated theory of the 
relationships among neural tissue, cognitive processes, and phenomenology we are not 
in a position to entertain or even deem likely the possibility that tiny brains can give rise 
to sentient lives with interests that merit moral protection.” If TERSA is true, why not 
TERSA-minus? 
Why is such a well-worked-out theory and its empirical corroboration needed to prevent us from 
eliminating the possibility of sentience in nonhuman animals but not required for conferring 
sentience on them? If something like TERSA is true, then we should be agnostic about the mental 
lives of, say, arthropods. 
One way to accept TERSA but block TERSA-minus would be to adopt a robust precautionary 
principle (PP). We suspect M&P’s argument presumes some version of PP. The trouble is that this 
is in tension with critical comments M&P make later about the vagueness of PPs, and about 
problems with Birch’s (2017) specific application of PP to animal sentience. M&P (rightly) point 
out a problem for many versions of PP: there are costs associated with precautionary measures, 
often in terms of the interests or well-being of other morally considerable entities. If precautions 
were cost-free, we would demand the highest standards of safety for any moral hazard. This is 
the thrust of Sunstein’s (2003, 2018) critique of PP as part of his defense of cost-benefit analysis.  
M&P conclude their discussion of PP by claiming that if the costs of precaution are substantial, 
“we have strong moral incentive to get the attribution of sentience right; extreme positions that 
require either very high or very low levels of certainty ought to be rejected." TERSA-minus 
requires a very high level of certainty to attribute sentience. Conversely, TERSA requires a very 
low level of certainty to attribute sentience: We cannot eliminate the hypothesis that arthropods 
are sentient without a complete theory of the mind.  
2.  A measurement problem.  We do need to get the attributions of sentience right in order to 
tackle a deeper philosophical problem: how do we measure and compare moral interests and 
welfare? More pressingly: how do we adjudicate conflicts of moral interest between species (cf. 
Treves et al. 2019)? Anyone who has taken a drive down a rural highway on a summer night has 
committed arthropod slaughter. If arthropods are indeed sentient, we need some sort of moral 
calculus to evaluate when we are compromising their moral interests and under what 
circumstances it is permissible to do so. The proportion of arthropod biomass on Earth is over 
Animal Sentience 2020.359:  Forber & Jones on Mikhailovich & Powell on Invertebrate Minds 
3 
 
sixteen times that of human biomass and obviously individual arthropods have an average mass 
much less than individual humans (Bar-On et al. 2018). They outnumber us in dramatic fashion.1  
 
It is known to be difficult to make Intersubjective comparisons of utility work, yet they are the 
foundation of any resolution of conflicts of interest between morally considerable entities (cf. 
Narens & Skyrms 2018; Skyrms & Narens 2019). Human interpersonal comparisons are the “easiest” 
case because we each have an intimate perspective on what it is like to be a human with moral 
interests—yet we lack a consensus even for that case. Expanding the moral circle (which we 
support) involves bringing nonhumans into the space of moral considerability, but without the 
same intimate perspective on their inner lives.  
We can still make progress, especially on closely related species such as chimps or other great 
apes (Andrews et al 2018). This is a comparison facilitated by evolutionary homology. Being 
bipedal mammals who split with the chimp lineage several million years ago helps give humans 
a sense of their moral interests. But as we range farther afield across the evolutionary tree, we 
lose this traction. It may be impossible to evaluate the moral interests of bees independently 
from the moral interests of their colonies (Monsó & Osuna-Mascaró 2020). Questions about the 
moral interests of invertebrates become entangled with puzzles about biological individuality, 
further complicating the moral calculus. Such challenges need to be met before one can advise 
policy makers or moral actors. 
 
References 
 
Andrews K, Comstock GL, Crozier GKD, Donaldson S, Fenton A, John TM, Johnson LSM, Jones RC, 
Kymlicka W and Meynell L (2018) Chimpanzee rights: The philosophers’ brief. Routledge. 
Bar-On Y M, Phillips R & Milo R (2018) The biomass distribution of Earth. Proceedings of the 
National Academy of Sciences 115(25):6506-6511.  
Birch J (2017) Animal sentience and the precautionary principle. Animal Sentience: An 
Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling 16(1). 
Mikhalevich, Irina & Powell, Russell (2020) Minds without spines: Evolutionarily inclusive animal 
ethics. Animal Sentience 29(1) 
Narens L and Skyrms B (2018) Accomodation dynamics for comparing utilities with others. 
Philosophical Studies 175:2419-2427. 
Monsó S and Osuna-Mascaró A J (2020) Problems with basing insect ethics on individuals' welfare 
Animal Sentience 29(8). 
Skyrms B & Narens L (2019) Measuring the hedonimeter. Philosophical Studies. 176(12): 3199–
3210. 
Sunstein C (2003) The Paralyzing Principle: Does the Precautionary Principle Point us in any Helpful 
Direction? Regulation, Winter 20022003. 
Sunstein C (2018) The Cost-Benefit Revolution. MIT Press  
Treves, Adrian; Santiago-Ávila, Francisco J.; and Lynn, William S. (2019) Just preservation. Animal 
Sentience 27(1) 
 
1 We focus on the utilitarian version of the problem although the reasoning generalizes to other ethical 
frameworks. 


English

Spineless and sentient: a challenge for moral comparison

In prescribing blanket policy bans around wildlife and industrial animal farming as a protective response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Wiebers & Feigin ignore the geographical context of their bans and reinforce problematic boundaries between nature and human society, human cultural groups, and animal-related industries

Urbanik, Julie

Urbanik, Julie (2020) Reinforcing boundaries does not contribute to change. 
Animal Sentience 30(27) 
DOI: 10.51291/2377-7478.1661 
This article has appeared in the journal Animal Sentience, 
a peer-reviewed journal on animal cognition and feeling. It 
has been made open access, free for all, by WellBeing 
International and deposited in the WBI Studies 
Repository. For more information, please contact 
wbisr-info@wellbeingintl.org. 
Animal Sentience 2020.391:  Urbanik on Wiebers & Feigin on Covid Crisis  
 
 
 1 
 
 
Reinforcing boundaries does not contribute to change  
Commentary on Wiebers & Feigin on Covid Crisis 
 
Julie Urbanik  
Consultant and Scholar  
 
Abstract:  In prescribing blanket policy bans around wildlife and industrial animal farming as 
a protective response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Wiebers & Feigin ignore the geographical 
context of their bans and reinforce problematic boundaries between nature and human 
society, human cultural groups, and animal-related industries.  
 
Julie Urbanik is a consultant and scholar. She holds a Ph.D. in 
Geography and is the co-founder of the Animal Geography Specialty 
Group of the Association of American Geographers. She is the author of 
the award-winning book Placing Animals and co-edited the first animal 
studies encyclopedia Humans and Animals: A Geography of 
Coexistence. Website  
1. Introduction. That Covid-19 has brought a variety of animal-related issues to the forefront 
of people’s minds around the world is, in my view, a huge opportunity for all of us who care 
about nonhumans, humans and the planet, so I appreciate the perspectives of 
neuroepidemiologists Wiebers & Feigin (2020) (W&F). In this commentary, I highlight what a 
geographic perspective brings to the table in order to map out the complexities involved in 
what W&F propose as the simple solution of banning wildlife trade, wildlife markets, and 
factory farms. To this end, I will try to deepen the arguments made by Robbins (2020) about 
oversimplifying the issues with an explanation of animal geography and will then highlight 
three ways in which W&F’s thoughts reflect an uncontextualized approach to human-animal 
interactions that reinforces, rather than overcomes, existing problematic boundary-making 
mindsets. 
Geography, as an academic field, explores the environmental and human processes 
that shape our planet. Animal geography is defined as the study of where, when, why and 
how nonhuman animals, as subjects in their own right, intersect with human societies 
(Urbanik 2012).  Research covers the gamut of human-animal interactions through place and 
scale-based analyses of political, social, cultural, and economic conditions.  Animal 
geographers are often interested in the production of boundaries (e.g., where/how are 
animals constructed as in/out of place, where/how have humans and animals been 
separated). These points of demarcation can help deepen our contextual understanding of 
human-animal relations and provide opportunities for new ways of encountering, treating, 
and living with nonhumans (Wolch & Emel 1998; Gillespie & Collard 2015).   
In their analysis, W&F, inadvertently or not, have obscured their own boundary-
making in three areas: the human/nature divide, political-cultural divides, and industry 
divides.  This has afforded them an easier path to advocating direct bans than is warranted. 
2.  Reinforcing the Human-animal/nature Boundary.  W&F’s suggestion to ban practices 
related to wildlife consumption, factory farming, and habitat destruction reinforces western 
notions of humans as separate from nature. These notions have come through western 
Christianity and western science (Merchant 2004) and ignore the decades of work by animal 
studies and environmental scholars challenging this very separation (Kalof & Fitzgerald 2007).  
For example, recent work in animal geography (Lorimer 2020) explores how we are coming 
Animal Sentience 2020.391:  Urbanik on Wiebers & Feigin on Covid Crisis  
 
 
 2 
 
 
to understand – through a variety of fields - that humans are not even purely human but 
instead made human through the interaction of multiple species in our microbiomes.  To 
argue that the solution to pandemics is to block ourselves off from encountering the living 
and nonliving entities that might harm us is a futile enterprise and one that goes against the 
ongoing evolutionary interactions that have shaped the planet and the human species.   
3.  Reinforcing Political-Cultural Boundaries.  W&F are quick to jump on the bandwagon of 
banning wildlife trade and wildlife consumption while (a) inadequately defining their terms 
and (b) reinforcing stereotypes and western privilege.  Calling for a ban on “wet markets” that 
sell wildlife obfuscates the fact that wet markets are basically the same as farmer’s markets 
in the U.S. (albeit the latter are without live wild or domesticated animals); in East Asia they 
are places of cultural connection and they provide economic livelihoods (Lynteris & Fearnley 
2020).  Yes, people around the world eat wildlife and have done so since the beginning of 
humanity,  yet framing the eating of wildlife by Asians or Africans as wrong is to set an artificial 
and condescending boundary between right and wrong cultures that smacks of a colonial 
mindset.   
That Covid-19 has created what W&F refer to as “global psychological distress” is true; 
however, what is also true is that the developed, largely western nations have been 
particularly distressed because we have been privileged enough not to have to live with daily 
worries about contracting any number of animal-based diseases.  Malaria alone has caused 
people to live with distress and kills roughly 400,000 people a year in Africa (WHO 2019).  
Travel bans, lack of food supplies, empty shelves, economic distress, political chaos, and 
uncertainty about the future are issues faced by hundreds of millions of people every day.   To 
act as if Covid-19 is new on the psychological front is to ignore these realities (Albaih 2020).  
Instead of condemning these people for surviving in their cultural landscapes, perhaps we in 
the north and west could learn from their resilience. 
4.  Reinforcing Hierarchical Economic Boundaries.  What perhaps best epitomizes W&F’s 
selective boundary-making relates to their desire to ban a “USD74 billion wildlife farming 
industry” in China as well as the entire global factory farming industry without also calling for 
a ban on the multi-billion dollar global animal experimentation industry and, more 
specifically, a global ban on biolabs researching infectious diseases.  That a biolab studying 
infectious diseases and diseases that can cross species would be banned would no doubt be 
anathema to W&F because of the potential knowledge gained from the animal 
experimentation economy.  Yet are they not petri dishes for future pandemics?  Are they not 
locations of horrific treatment of nonhumans?  As the response by Whitfort (2020) shows, 
the lack of animal welfare regulation in China is a problem, but it is only a reflection of a global 
animal experimentation industry that overwhelmingly treats animals as objects. The race for 
a Covid-19 vaccine is purported to require the massive use of species such as sharks (Bowman 
2020) and yet W&F fail to grapple with the logic of telling others they can’t eat or farm 
nonhumans (wild or domestic) while exempting their own industry from scrutiny.  
Additionally, W&F fail to contextualize that it was the U.S. animal sciences industry that 
brought us factory farms and pushed antibiotic use in the first place (Anderson 2019; Neo & 
Emel 2017). 
In conclusion, the need for dialogue and change in a post-Covid-19 world is real; 
however, as academics I believe we have a better chance of policy success if we provide paths 
through contextual complexity rather than reinforcing problematic cultural, political, and 
economic boundaries.  
Animal Sentience 2020.391:  Urbanik on Wiebers & Feigin on Covid Crisis  
 
 
 3 
 
 
 
References  
 
Albaih, K. (2020) Our old normal. In: And we came outside and saw the stars again (I. 
Stavans, (Ed)). Restless Books: 108-112. 
Anderson, J.L. (2019) Capitalist pigs: Pigs, pork and power in America.  West Virginia 
University Press. 
Bowman, E. (2020) A coronavirus vaccine could kill half a million sharks, conservationists 
warn.  National Public Radio. 
Gillespie, K. and R-C. Collard (Eds). (2015) Critical animal geographies: Politics, intersections, 
and hierarchies in a multispecies world.  Routledge. 
Kalof, L. and A. Fitzgerald (Eds.) (2007) The animals reader: The essential classic and 
contemporary writings. Berg. 
Lorimer, J. (2020) The probiotic planet: Using life to manage life. University of Minnesota. 
Lynteris, C. and L. Fearnley. (2020)  Why shutting down Chinese ‘wet markets’ could be a 
terrible mistake.  The Conversation. 
Merchant, C. (2004) Reinventing Eden: The fate of nature in western culture. Routledge. 
Neo, H. and J. Emel (2017)  Geographies of meat: Politics, economy and culture.  Taylor and 
Francis. 
Robbins, J.A. (2020) Be wary of simple solutions to complex problems. Animal Sentience 
30(16). 
Urbanik, J. (2012) Placing animals: An introduction to the geography of human-animal 
relations. Rowman and Littlefield. 
Whitford, A. (2020) China’s lack of animal welfare legislation increases the risk of further 
pandemics. Animal Sentience 30(11). 
Wiebers, D.O. and V. Feigin (2020)  What the Covid-19 crisis is telling humanity.  Animal 
Sentience 30(1). 
(WHO) World Health Organization (2019) The world malaria report 2019. 
Wolch, J. and J. Emel (Eds.) (1998) Animal geographies: Place, politics, and identity in the 
nature-culture borderlands. Verso. 
 


Reinforcing boundaries does not contribute to change

https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent_gallery/1469/thumbnail.jp

Batavia

https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent_gallery/1470/thumbnail.jp

Wienhues

https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent_gallery/1477/thumbnail.jp

Lorimer

https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent_gallery/1494/thumbnail.jp

Jasinghe

https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent_gallery/1500/thumbnail.jp

Correia-Caeiro

https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent_gallery/1514/thumbnail.jp

Cammaerts

https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent_gallery/1522/thumbnail.jp

Mallatt3

https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent_gallery/1539/thumbnail.jp

Not a member yet