Episode Details
Back to Episodes“Discussions of (p)sentience of small animals miss the point” by Jim Buhler
Description
Tl;dr: You need to make specific moral weight assumptions to decide who to prioritize between animals with different degrees of sentience. And the moral weight of a given being is not its p(sentience). One could very well be certain that shrimp and insects feel pain (and are as badly off as they could possibly be), yet believe that they do so to a degree too small for them to be prioritized. Debates about interspecies tradeoffs should outline welfare ranges, over p(sentience), as the relevant crux.
When people defend prioritizing cognitively simpler animals over more complex ones, they tend to appeal to i) their numbers, ii) evidence of their sentience, and iii) some form of expected value maximization, even if slightly risk-averse.
While I am pretty sympathetic to prioritizing cognitively simpler beings, I think the above appeal misses the key crux, by mistakenly making (ii) about p(sentience) rather than about degree of sentience, or welfare range. For the conclusion to follow, (ii) needs to be: evidence of a welfare range that is not too insignificant to crucially undermine the importance of their large numbers.
It is quite easy to believe that shrimp and many insects are likely sentient.[1] In fact [...]
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First published:
April 21st, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.