Skip to main content
Home

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Series
  • People
  • Depts & Colleges
  • Open Education

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Series
  • People
  • Depts & Colleges
  • Open Education

Minds Without Spines: Toward a More Comprehensive Animal Ethics

Series
Uehiro Oxford Institute
Audio Embed
In this OUC-WEH Joint Seminar, Irina Mikhalevich argues that the moral status of invertebrate animals is often overlooked, and sets out why animal ethics should be more inclusive and comprehensive.
Invertebrate animals account for approximately 95% of all extant species and an astounding 99.9% of all animals on Earth, ranging from the sessile and brainless sea sponge to social-learners such as bumblebees and flexible problem-solvers like the common octopus. Despite this diversity, these animals are commonly lumped together as a group and subsequently excluded from subject-centered moral consideration and legal protections. This is likely due to a range of cognitive biases (such as biases in favor of more attractive, larger, longer lived, less numerous, and less disgust-provoking animals), false empirical judgments (such as the belief that very small brains cannot support cognition or consciousness), and unjustified moral anxieties (such as the concern that extending moral consideration to invertebrates threatens to make morality overly demanding). Recent developments in comparative cognition research, however, indicate the presence of sophisticated cognitive abilities and emotion-like states in many invertebrates, and neuroethology is beginning to reveal how the tiny brains of these animals can give rise to cognition and, perhaps, consciousness. At the same time, conceptual and methodological problems in animal cognition science result in significant uncertainties about the presence of complex cognition in animals generally and invertebrates in particular, and it is unclear how these scientific uncertainties should affect our ethical analyses. Perhaps even more fundamentally, studies of invertebrate cognition may prompt us to rethink vertebrate-centric approaches to moral standing, including some of its operative assumptions about the behavioral indicators of pain and the relevance of pain states to moral standing. This talk lays the foundation for a more comprehensive, inclusive, and scientifically engaged animal ethics – one that responds both to the novel scientific evidence and to the philosophical challenges that confront the scientific study of these ‘alien’ minds on Earth.

More in this series

View Series
Uehiro Oxford Institute

Rethinking 'Disease': A Fresh Diagnosis and a New Philosophical Treatment

In this OUC-WEH Joint Seminar, Russell Powell explores the concept of 'disease'
Previous
Uehiro Oxford Institute
Captioned

Fake News and the Politics of Truth

Fake news spread online is a clear danger to democratic politics. One aspect of that danger is obvious: it spreads misinformation. But other aspects, less often discussed, is that it also spreads confusion and undermines trust.
Next
Transcript Available

Episode Information

Series
Uehiro Oxford Institute
People
Irina Mikhalevich
Keywords
animal ethics
invertebrate animals
moral status
animal cognition
Department: Uehiro Oxford Institute
Date Added: 19/06/2018
Duration: 00:46:00

Subscribe

Apple Podcast Video Apple Podcast Audio Audio RSS Feed

Download

Download Audio Download Transcript

Footer

  • About
  • Accessibility
  • Contribute
  • Copyright
  • Contact
  • Privacy
'Oxford Podcasts' Twitter Account @oxfordpodcasts | MediaPub Publishing Portal for Oxford Podcast Contributors | Upcoming Talks in Oxford | © 2011-2022 The University of Oxford