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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Animal Models, Agendas And Sentience, Thomas Creson
Animal Models, Agendas And Sentience, Thomas Creson
Animal Sentience
Woodruff’s target article on teleost consciousness is a well-organized logical argument for considering the fish as a sentient being. This becomes more important for animal ethical discussion as the fish becomes a more important and legitimate animal model for investigating animal states and traits associated with higher levels of behavior such as learning and memory.
In What Sense Are You A Person?, Pamela Barone, Antoni Gomila
In What Sense Are You A Person?, Pamela Barone, Antoni Gomila
Animal Sentience
According to Rowlands, personhood in nonhuman animals calls for a unified mental life and pre-reflective self-awareness provides this. The concept of “person” is fuzzy. Any attempt to define it with necessary and sufficient conditions faces the problem of borderline cases satisfying only some of the conditions to varying degrees. We ask about the implications of a metaphysical sense of personhood for its moral and legal sense. Finally, we address Rowlands’s reliance on pre-reflective self-awareness and present our own criteria for personhood.
“Hot” So Fast, Alex Howe
“Hot” So Fast, Alex Howe
Animal Sentience
Mark Rowlands’s target article offers a lucid, systematic treatment of a notion of personhood that has had significant influence in philosophy. The orthodox interpretation of this notion of personhood has been that it requires cognitive capacities not possessed by animals. Rowlands disputes this. However, I think his objections to the orthodox, higher-order thought (HOT) theories of mental unity may be too quick. In this commentary, I show two separable places where Rowlands’s objection to HOT theories of mental unity falls short.
From Thinking Selves To Social Selves, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg
From Thinking Selves To Social Selves, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg
Animal Sentience
I argue that Rowlands’s concept of pre-reflective self-awareness offers a way to understand animals as Social Selves. It does so because it departs from the orthodox conception of self-awareness, which is both egocentric and logocentric. Instead, its focus is on the relation between consciousness and a person’s lived body, her actions and goals. Characterizing persons as pre-reflectively self-aware beings in Rowlands’s sense offers a much more useful conceptual tool to interpret social behaviour in animals.
What Do We Owe Animals As Persons?, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg
What Do We Owe Animals As Persons?, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg
Animal Sentience
Rowlands (2016) concentrates strictly on the metaphysical concept of person, but his notion of animal personhood bears a moral dimension (Monsó, 2016). His definition of pre-reflective self-awareness has a focus on sentience and on the lived body of a person as well as on her implicit awareness of her own goals. Interestingly, these also play a key role in animal welfare science, as well as in animal rights theories that value the interests of animals. Thus, Rowlands’s concept shows connectivity with both major fields of animal ethics. His metaphysical arguments might indeed contain a strong answer to the question of …
The Moral Dimension Of Pre-Reflective Self-Awareness, Susana Monsó
The Moral Dimension Of Pre-Reflective Self-Awareness, Susana Monsó
Animal Sentience
Rowlands offers a de-intellectualised account of personhood that is meant to secure the unity of a mental life. I argue that his characterisation also singles out a morally relevant feature of individuals. Along the same lines that the orthodox understanding of personhood reflects a fundamental precondition for moral agency, Rowlands’s notion provides a fundamental precondition for moral patienthood.
Are Animals Persons?, Mark Rowlands
Are Animals Persons?, Mark Rowlands
Animal Sentience
It is orthodox to suppose that very few, if any, nonhuman animals are persons. The category “person” is restricted to self-aware creatures: humans (above a certain age) and possibly some of the great apes and cetaceans. I argue that this orthodoxy should be rejected, because it rests on a mistaken conception of the kind of self-awareness relevant to personhood. Replacing this with a sense of self-awareness that is relevant requires us to accept that personhood is much more widely distributed through the animal kingdom.