In June 2024, the BBC reported that some scientists, philosophers, and others were actually daring to think the unthinkable: at least some nonhuman animals may be conscious.
This was a puzzling announcement. Ever since the 19th century, at least in the West, we have embraced as a moral matter that it is wrong to be “cruel” to animals and to cause them “unnecessary” pain. We take this moral norm so seriously that we have anticruelty laws that attach a criminal sanction to commission of the prohibited conduct. You cannot be cruel to a rock, or cause a chair to suffer unnecessarily. Animals are at least sentient; that is, they are subjectively aware and are capable of experiencing pain. If they were not, we could not treat them in a cruel fashion. Sentient animals are conscious of (at least) their subjective experience.
Of course, we may not be sure about which animals are sentient. The BBC article talks about hundreds of studies that have already showed that decapods and cephalopods, which include octopus, squid, and cuttlefish, are all sentient. Still, there are borderline cases. For example, we may not know whether clams or mussels are sentient. We may not know about insects. But does anyone who has ever interacted with a pet dog, cat, hamster, parrot, or canary doubt that they are conscious? We live with several rescued dogs. If you were to ask me if our dogs were conscious, I would find that as peculiar a question as if you asked me whether our dogs have tails. The only way to explain their behaviour is to posit consciousness to them or to believe, as Descartes did, that they are simply machines made by God, capable of very complicated actions but not possessing consciousness. There is no third option.
And most of the animals we routinely exploit for food and other purposes are also unquestionably sentient. There is an area of study, “farmed animal welfare,” which would make absolutely no sense unless those animals had interests that could be (and most certainly are) adversely affected by our actions toward them.
The BBC is not alone here in making these announcements. In 2012, a conference on animal consciousness held at Cambridge University produced a Declaration on Consciousness, which declared: “[T]he weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.” In 2024, New York University produced a similar Declaration.
The fact that claims that the consciousness of animals are presented as news suggests that the jury is still out on the issue of animal consciousness, and that is wrong. The jury is in and the verdict is unanimous: almost all of the animals with whom we interact as pets or as food are conscious.
So what is the explanation for the BBC announcement, and the Cambridge and NYU Declarations?
One possible source of interest in something that we already know may involve the persistence of doubt about whether conscious animals are self-conscious. Although we have long recognised that many animal species are sentient and can suffer, and that we have a moral and legal obligation not to impose “unnecessary” suffering on animals and to treat them “humanely,” we have not recognised that sentience alone is sufficient to give rise to animals having a morally significant interest in continuing to live so that we ought not to be killing them in the first place, at least absent a very good reason. A standard rationalisation for this—going all the way back to Jeremy Bentham—is that animals may be sentient, but they are not self-aware. They have no connection with a future self so killing them is not really harming them because they don’t know what it is we are taking from them.
This thinking set the course for the animal welfare movement that followed and established the moral and legal idea that we should minimise the suffering that we imposed on animals but it was perfectly fine for us to continue to use and kill them.
This goal of the animal welfare movement was frustrated by a legal fact that Bentham, although a lawyer, did not appreciate nearly as much as he should have: animals exist as our property. They are chattel; they are economic commodities that we own and get to value. This is true of all animals, not just those we eat. You may love your dog or cat and treat them as members of your family. You can choose to do that because your animals are your property; you can decide how to value them. You may also not care very much for your dog or cat and take them to your vet to be “put to sleep,” or, more accurately, killed, or take them to a shelter where they will be killed if another home is not found, or, depending on where you live, kill them yourself. They are your property; you have the right, as property owner, to decide how to value them.
Bentham failed to recognise that because animals are property, the level of suffering we would impose on them would be more a matter of economics than morality; we protect animal interests to the extent it is economically efficient to do so. For example, laws that require large farm animals to be rendered unconscious before being slaughtered are seeking to prevent worker injuries and carcass damage, both of which can involve financial loss. It is inefficient to not stun the animals. Bentham did not recognise that, because animals are chattel property, the level of animal welfare would be limited to economically efficient exploitation.
And although Bentham was concerned that slavery, if permitted, would become a huge industry involving many enslaved persons, he failed to foresee that the exact same thing would happen with nonhuman animals. He did not anticipate the emergence of factory farming that would involve massive operations confining huge numbers of animals in closed sheds.
In any case, the one thing that has become clear is that the animal welfare movement has, because animals are property, failed disastrously. Indeed, by the mid-20th century, we were exploiting more animals in more horrific ways than when Bentham was around. And that recognition caused us to revisit the animal welfare paradigm and thereby gave rise to modern animal ethics.
A major concern of modern animal ethics has been whether, contrary to what Bentham thought, at least some nonhuman animals can be said to be self-aware and we may, therefore, sensibly talk about those animals being nonhuman moral persons who have morally significant interests in not suffering and in continuing to live. Indeed, the two most significant philosophers in modern animal ethics—Peter Singer and Tom Regan—focus heavily on the issue of whether animals have an interest in not being used and killed, as well as an interest in not suffering. Both Singer (a utilitarian) and Regan (a rights theorist) maintain that some animals are persons with such morally significant interests in continuing to live. For the most part, they take the same position with respect to which animals are covered: if an animal has a connection with a future self, then the animal has moral value that exceeds that of a merely sentient animal without a connection to a future self. For Singer, who rejects rights, if an animal is self-aware and has a connection with a future self, then there is a rebuttable presumption against using and killing the animal. For Regan, such an animal (he calls them “subjects of a life”) should be accorded a right that prohibits using and killing them.
To the extent that an interest in animal consciousness leads to the position that animals, or at least some animals, are not only conscious but are self-conscious and have a connection with a future self, that could, in theory, provide a basis to argue that we have a moral obligation not to use and kill self-aware animals, and not just to use and kill them “humanely.”
However, the question of whether animals are self-aware in some quite rich sense of “self-aware” is not obviously fruitful to pursue. That is for two reasons.
First, trying to ascertain whether animals have minds that are similar to humans beyond being sentient—what I first wrote about in 2005 as the problem of similar minds—is doomed to failure from the start. Just as we have not had much success trying to solve the “hard problem of consciousness”—how physical processes give rise to conscious states—where humans are concerned, we are not likely to have success pursuing how consciousness arises in nonhumans or what animal consciousness is like. We are the only animals who use symbolic communication and we do not know what it is like to think without the concepts we get from language. In brief, animal minds are clearly different in at least some important ways from human minds. Even if we were to identify self-awareness in animals, it is not clear we would ever reach agreement as to whether that characteristic really existed in nonhuman minds, or whether it was sufficiently similar to self-awareness in humans to be morally relevant.
Second, as I have explored at length, we need to ask why we need more than sentience to conclude that sentient nonhumans are self-aware and have a morally significant interest in continuing to live.
For, as Donald Griffin has argued, sentience on its own plausibly suffices for at least minimal self-awareness. If an animal is perceptually aware and perceives that some other animal is climbing a tree, part of what the perceiving animal thereby knows is that it is another animal who is climbing the tree. Some level of self-awareness exists in any being who is perceptually aware.
More importantly, every sentient being is connected to a future self if only in the next second of consciousness. Sentience is the means to the end of beings who are sentient continuing to exist. To say that a sentient being does not have an interest in continuing to live is like saying that a being who has eyes does not have an interest in continuing to see. We recognise this where humans are concerned. A human with severe dementia who lives in an eternal present is still regarded as a person with an interest in continuing to live because he is connected to his future self if only in the next second of consciousness. We understand that, if we require a greater connection with a future self, we end up with an arbitrary situation where a person who is connected to a future self in the next, say, fifteen minutes, is a person, and the human who lives in the eternal present is not. There is no principled way to determine when the quality of being a human person with a morally significant interest in continuing to live, emerges, and no animal ethicist has to date even proposed one.
But, in the end, I suspect that our thinking about animal minds is guided more by our desire to continue to use—particularly to eat—animals. Thus, although many of us would find it bizarre to question whether a dog or cat is conscious, we might avoid thinking about whether the cow or chicken or pig or fish is conscious in order to get around the dissonance of treating some animals as members of the family while sticking forks into other animals. But we should be more honest with ourselves; we know they’re all conscious. They may not have cognition exactly similar to ours; we may not understand the details of their consciousness; but we know they are not Cartesian automatons and that they are subjectively aware.
Given that what we know about animal minds to date—and that animals are like us in the way that may be most relevant to our lives in the ability to suffer—hasn’t made much, if any difference, in how we treat nonhuman animals, I can’t say that I am particularly optimistic that this renewed interest in animal consciousness will result in anything positive for animals.
Gary L. Francione is Board of Governors Professor of Law and Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy Emeritus at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is also tutor in philosophy, Oxford University (Continuing Education), visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Lincoln (UK), and honorary professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia (UK). His latest book is Why Veganism Matters: The Moral Value of Animals.
