Permalink Submitted by Harry Wels on 14 January 2019
Organization/ affiliation:
African Studies Centre Leiden / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Dear Bert,
Thank you for your new comment, especially because it touches on basic assumptions that we maybe not share completely and that may explain our differences.
Allow me to respond especially to the second half of your comment, starting from ‘Are there non-human sentient beings?’ till the end of your comment 'would be my starting point ...'.
If we allow weight to scientific evidence and ‘proof’, your opening question is already answered by the scientific community in the affirmative, ‘yes, there is no longer any scientific doubt that there is non-human sentience’ and scientists have declared that officially and publicly, see: http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf.
You ask, what you/we would do differently if you/we ‘admitted’ (an interesting choice of word in itself in relation to going about overwhelming scientific evidence that sentience is not exclusively human, see Cambridge Declaration above) that there are non-human sentient beings? My answer would be that maybe we would stop killing non-human sentience so easily and routinely for our own human interests and pleasure, ranging from food (i.e. meat and dairy) to medicine and biology (i.e. laboratory animals and vivisection) to nature conservation (i.e. hunting and culling, see the introduction to Gewald et al's recent book (2018) in the African Dynamics Series).
Finally you write ‘Politics is about choices’ and I certainly agree with you there. But democratic politics is also about ‘representation of’, ‘giving voice to’ and protecting the vulnerable and less-powerful in society. If we want to live up to that idea of political choices, non-human sentient beings should be definitely part of it.
Dear Bert,
Thank you for your new comment, especially because it touches on basic assumptions that we maybe not share completely and that may explain our differences.
Allow me to respond especially to the second half of your comment, starting from ‘Are there non-human sentient beings?’ till the end of your comment 'would be my starting point ...'.
If we allow weight to scientific evidence and ‘proof’, your opening question is already answered by the scientific community in the affirmative, ‘yes, there is no longer any scientific doubt that there is non-human sentience’ and scientists have declared that officially and publicly, see: http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf.
You ask, what you/we would do differently if you/we ‘admitted’ (an interesting choice of word in itself in relation to going about overwhelming scientific evidence that sentience is not exclusively human, see Cambridge Declaration above) that there are non-human sentient beings? My answer would be that maybe we would stop killing non-human sentience so easily and routinely for our own human interests and pleasure, ranging from food (i.e. meat and dairy) to medicine and biology (i.e. laboratory animals and vivisection) to nature conservation (i.e. hunting and culling, see the introduction to Gewald et al's recent book (2018) in the African Dynamics Series).
Finally you write ‘Politics is about choices’ and I certainly agree with you there. But democratic politics is also about ‘representation of’, ‘giving voice to’ and protecting the vulnerable and less-powerful in society. If we want to live up to that idea of political choices, non-human sentient beings should be definitely part of it.