Sentient Beings

Week 6 Discussion

Sentient Beings

Should animals have the same moral consideration as human beings? In his article, "All Animals Are Equal," Peter Singer (1989) asserts that the same moral equality that human beings claim for one another should also be applied to animals. In other words, he asserts that although not all humans are equal (consider children and persons with severe mental disabilities), they are all given equal consideration because they have an equal capacity for happiness, enjoyment, and suffering. This capacity, called sentience, is a prerequisite for moral consideration. Animals, according to Singer, also should be given equal consideration because of their sentience even though they are not equal in all respects to humans.

Are human beings morally wrong to subject animals capable of experiencing pain and joy to cruelty, scientific experimentation, or captivity? Or are we simply practicing survival of the fittest, as animals do with one another in the wild? Persons in opposition to Singer might take an anthropocentric view, meaning that only humans have intrinsic worth, and thus animals should only be valued so far as they are useful to humans. This value is also known as instrumental value and is often assigned to physical and abstract objects. The questions posed above are not easy questions to answer, but you are encouraged to think critically about how you would justify a position toward animal treatment

To prepare for this Discussion:

Read Chapter 16, "Environmental Ethics" and Chapter 17, "Animal Rights" in the course text. Focus on the sections on anthropocentrism, sentience, and animal rights.

Read the Singer article "All Animals Are Equal," and consider whether human beings are morally obligated to treat animals in a particular way and what might constitute the moral treatment of animals.

Watch this video as well..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew0Vq7pgSUs 

For this Discussion- Write a paragraph explaining whether society is morally obligated to equally consider all sentient beings. Explain whether sentience should be considered when animal experimentation is used to develop new drugs that can save human lives. Justify your position. Include ethics-related terms in your post, and be sure to support your ideas by connecting them to the week's Learning Resources. Practice APA style for your in-text citations.