Journal
BIOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY
Volume 28, Issue 1, Pages 1-30Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10539-012-9351-1
Keywords
Animal; Welfare; Ethics; Pain; Sentience; Cognition; Agriculture; Speciesism; Biomedical research
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Funding
- Animal and Society Institute-Wesleyan Animal Studies (ASI-WAS)
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I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue that even the most progressive current welfare policies lag behind, are ignorant of, or arbitrarily disregard the science on sentience and cognition.
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