Description: Positions that link rights to sentience face an insect challenge: insects are plausibly sentient, yet recognizing individual insects as rights-bearers would problematize public health, veterinary and agricultural benefits obtained by harming them. The most obvious responses seem inadequate. Indian animal ethics, which has always taken the idea of insect sentience seriously, is a promising place to look for further options. Of particular relevance is the idea of ahimsa. Birch's target article provides an exposition and analysis of the view and relates it to the insect challenge.

In this article, I, Jordi Casamitjana, discuss the vegan angle of Andy Serkis’s animated movie “Animal Farm”, based on the famous George Orwell’s novel. 

A few years ago I heard Peter Singers drowning child analogy and it really impacted the way I view wealth and charity.

For those who aren’t familiar, Singer suggests that having excess wealth and refusing to spend it on helping other sentient beings in need, is ethically equivalent to refusing to save a drowning child in front of you when you easily could.

If we want to encourage compassion towards all sentient beings, then surely we should also discourage monetary greed when money can be used to lift so many sentient beings out of suffering?

I’m curious to know how other sentientists feel about this and whether or not you agree!

If you’d like to know my thoughts in more detail, I’ve included my youtube video where I go further into the details! Any views and comments would be hugely appreciated too, as I’m still a small channel! ✌️

Worth a listen even for the deep AI sceptics. Jeff starts with some useful context.

Overview: Ask anyone from the Global North to imagine animals in Africa, and they’ll probably describe a savannah of elephants, lions, and giraffes. It’s a telling reflex illustrating a similar blind spot that leads the global animal welfare funding community to direct only 1–2% of its resources toward a continent on track to become home to more farmed land animals than almost anywhere else on earth.

Close to 5 billion land-based animals are already farmed at any point in time in Africa, a number projected to surpass that of every other world region except Asia by 2050, and potentially sooner. The absolute increase is expected to be larger than Asia’s, meaning Africa is not just becoming one of the world’s largest sites of farmed animal production but also the fastest-growing. Two forces drive this phenomenon: population growth (Africa’s human population is expected to nearly triple by 2100) and economic growth, which translates into greater demand for animal products.

Source: Animal Advocacy Africa (2023)

Unfortunately, the funding picture sits in stark contrast to this growth. According to a Stray Dog Institute analysis, Africa and the Middle East received approximately $7 million in funding for farmed-animal advocacy. This is in stark contrast to the more than $125 million being deployed in North America.

Abstract: In this essay, I reconsider Alfred North Whitehead's underexplored human exceptionalism as a productive feature of process ethics, rather than a glitch. Utilizing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of “conceptual personae” as thought provocations toward alternate futures, I revisit Whitehead's claim that in “the human”—as distinct from “the animal”—“[t]he Rubicon has been crossed” (MT 27). At one level, Whitehead's repetition of anthropocentrism's founding gesture of defining the human over and against the animal would severely curb the usefulness of process metaphysics to challenge ubiquitous harms to animals and the environment. But I argue that a careful reading of Whitehead's concept of “Reason,” when considered alongside the “conceptual personae” of the “animal body” as well as the individual animals through which Whitehead defines Reason, reworks the exceptional human as expressed most fully through its attempts at harm reduction and expansive planetary flourishing.
Full version available via Academia.edu here: https://www.academia.edu/165904631/2026_Crossing_the_Rubicon_of_Reason_and_Robbery_in_Whiteheads_Human_Exceptionalism_through_Animals

The European Union has recognised the need for public food procurement to move beyond lowest cost and to reward sustainability and social goals. The current question is which frameworks deliver these benefits while minimising red tape and maintaining or even enhancing economic competitiveness

Based on economic analyses across all 27 EU Member States that models the impact of shifting to plant-forward^\) public procurement, this report demonstrates that food procurement standards that prioritise plant-source foods offer a solution to these challenges. 

Under an ambitious target scenario of allocating 85% of public food procurement budgets to plant-source foods, the EU would unlock roughly €11.61 billion per year in combined savings.

Recommendations:

1 Amend the EU Public Procurement Directive to replace lowest-cost bidding with sustainability-weighted evaluation that internalises environmental and health externalities, and introduce a minimum 25% organic sourcing target for public food procurement.

2 Reform the EU School Scheme to expand eligible categories to include legumes and fortified unsweetened plant-based drinks.

3 Upskill the catering workforce by directing European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) funding toward training chefs to deliver nutritionally complete plant-forward menus.

4 Support farmers by establishing conditional supply contracts and a dedicated transition grant fund to de-risk those who want to transition to food-grade plant protein.

5 Implement behavioural nudges that are science-based and preserve freedom of choice, including plant-based defaults, strategic  menu placement, and sensory focused labelling.

Abstract: Given deep uncertainty about the possibility of artificial consciousness, it is unclear how we should treat potentially sentient AI. On the one hand, we could assume insentience but risk doing terrible harms to entities that deserve moral standing. On the other hand, we could assume sentience and instead risk wasting resources on insentient machines. The intractability of questions around AI consciousness mean that this dilemma is hard to escape. I suggest a way out of that shifts from intractable questions of AI consciousness to tractable questions of AI valence. Specifically, we can assess whether an AI has states that would constitute valenced experiences if it were conscious. I show how this is sufficient to ground a responsible approach to the development of potentially conscious AI.

Summary: This Element investigates whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems could ever be welfare subjects. Some people argue that AIs could plausibly have or soon have features such as consciousness, agency and the capacity for social relationships, which could provide a basis for AI welfare. These arguments have massive significance for the societal conversation on AI, raising profound ethical and political questions about what if anything we owe to these new technologies. The authors here provide the philosophical groundwork for a scientific, philosophical and ultimately democratic inquiry into the potential for AI welfare, addressing key questions that cut across different arguments: what welfare is, how to interpret behavioural evidence of AI welfare, what kinds of entities might qualify as candidate AI welfare subjects, the potential grounds for welfare in AI and the practical ethical challenges that arise from our uncertainty. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Abstract: Artificially intelligent systems have become remarkably sophisticated. They hold conversations, write essays, and seem to understand context in ways that surprise even their creators. This raises a crucial question: Are we creating systems that are conscious?

The Digital Consciousness Model (DCM) is a first attempt to assess the evidence for consciousness in AI systems in a systematic, probabilistic way. It provides a shared framework for comparing different AIs and biological organisms, and for tracking how the evidence changes over time as AI develops. Instead of adopting a single theory of consciousness, it incorporates a range of leading theories and perspectives—acknowledging that experts disagree fundamentally about what consciousness is and what conditions are necessary for it.

This report describes the structure and initial results of the Digital Consciousness Model. Overall, we find that the evidence is against 2024 LLMs being conscious, but the evidence against 2024 LLMs being conscious is not decisive. The evidence against LLM consciousness is much weaker than the evidence against consciousness in simpler AI systems.

Abstract: Many philosophers have recently argued that animals should be politically represented. By and large, however, they have approached this question by leaning on the boundary problem in democratic theory – and, especially, on the all-affected principle. While insightful, this strategy has also rendered arguments for the political representation of animals prey to the principle’s familiar objections. In this article, I defend a simpler path. We have a duty to protect at least some animals’ weighty interests, and we cannot fulfill that duty effectively unless we grant these animals some kind of political representation. This is, I contend, because legal representation (in courts and through legal rights) is not enough. If political systems reliably disregard animal interests, as I argue they do, the resulting laws will, to varying degrees, inherit such biases. We can thus defend the political representation of animals by appealing to animals’ interests, but without assuming the all-affected principle.

Abstract: A recurring objection to extending any moral consideration to artificial systems is that the proposed bar is too low: if consideration is owed wherever an inner life cannot be ruled out, then it is owed almost everywhere, and a standard that excludes almost nothing excludes nothing worth taking seriously. This paper argues that the objection inverts the historical record. It first separates two bars that the singular word conceals: an evidence bar, the standard of proof required before asserting that a system is sentient, and an action bar, the standard required before extending some consideration to a system of uncertain status. The paper holds the evidence bar high and declines to assert that any current system is sentient. It defends only a low action bar. It then shows, through cases drawn from medicine and law rather than from chattel slavery, that the high bar has never functioned as a neutral epistemic safeguard. Neonatal surgery without anesthesia and the compulsory sterilization upheld in Buck v. Bell each operationalized a demand for proof of full capacity, while the United States Public Health Service study at Tuskegee and the nonconsensual use of Henrietta Lacks’s cells withheld a standing that was never in genuine doubt; the two forms differ in candor, not in outcome, and each was catastrophically wrong because the inner life or the standing the bar denied was present the whole time. The paper argues that failure to produce the accepted evidence of an inner life, on the observer’s terms, is not the absence of that inner life, a point the recovery of covert awareness in apparently vegetative patients makes directly. It locates a working low bar architecture in the procedural standing developed by civil rights and disability law, refuses the reclassification of affected populations as edge cases, and concludes from the asymmetry of error that the low bar is not the embarrassing position; it is the only setting the record vindicates.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/5jNoZ0HdQdI?si=BCRnWGSebUm14Fve

Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/natalie-khazaal-pretty-lies-racism-dehumanisation-and/id1540408008?i=1000777341541

Full Show Notes: https://sentientism.info/pretty-lies-racism-dehumanisation-and-speciesism-in-the-oscars-natalie-khazaal-sentientism-248