This has assisted animal welfare advocates in their efforts to get governments to legislate at least minimal standards for the protection of these creatures. This is a classic example of how, even when sentience is denied, it is still taken as a primary indicator of one’s moral concerns.ĭespite this widespread defence mechanism, there is convincing evidence for sentience in mammalian farm animals.
Therefore, human carnivores can cognitively disengage from the harsh effects of the industrial farms and slaughterhouses, and get on with their meals. This denial naturally allows the human carnivore to reduce cognitive dissonance: if the animal is not sentient, it doesn’t know suffering. Social psychologists have found that humans who eat meat attribute significantly fewer indicators of sentience to animals that end up on their plate than do vegetarians. So the question of moral status is tied up in the question of sentience: its definition and its application. Ethicists from Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century to Peter Singer in the 20th have forcefully argued that the capacity of an animal to suffer demands that it be given standing in our moral community. Because of this, sentient beings have the capacity to suffer, and it is this ability that intuitively affects their moral status. More simply put, sentience is the ability to have the feel of a sensory experience. By this I mean the minimal capacity to have a direct subjective experience of the qualities associated with sensations and accompanying affectual states. However, there are also explicit cognitive factors that influence the moral status we assign animals. Perhaps the occasional person finds the occasional fish cute – and some species, such as the pufferfish, might seem more expressive than others, such as the blobfish – but generally scales and slime count strongly against cuteness and cuddliness. Fish don’t much benefit from either of these. Why? Put more broadly, what influences whether we do, or don’t, see ‘the face of the other’ in an animal?įrom an aesthetic standpoint, two factors stand out: our human predisposition towards cuteness and cuddliness. The child’s answer notwithstanding, fish are seldom, if ever, assigned faces in this manner. In that sense, are we ready to say that fish have faces?
Dogs have ‘the face of the other’ because we hold them in a high moral favour. We grant them an existential status that leads to their inclusion in our moral community and an assignment of rights and protections occasionally approaching those we afford to other people. Faces and morality, it seems, are intimately bound up with one another.Īs the philosophers Mark Coeckelbergh and David Gunkel have noted, we often give dogs this kind of face, as evidenced by the individual names we bestow on them and their closeness to our lives. By ‘face’, Levinas meant a ‘living presence’, that is, a kind of expression of personhood. Whether we perceive an animal to have what the existential philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in 1961 called ‘the face of the Other’ is crucial in determining the moral status we grant it. But there are far-reaching consequences to this answer, and it needs to be considered carefully. It seems to have all the essentials of a face. A 10-year-old would likely answer yes: after all, a fish has eyes, a mouth and what can pass as a snout. Do fish have faces? In one sense, the question is trivial.
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