Sentiocentrism, sentio-centrism, or sentientism is an ethical view that places sentient individuals at the center of moral concern. It holds that both humans and other sentient individuals have interests that must be considered.[1] Gradualist sentiocentrism attributes moral consideration relatively to the degree of sentience.[2]
Sentiocentrists consider that arbitrarily giving different moral weight to sentient beings based solely on their species membership is a form of unjustified discrimination known as speciesism. Many self-described humanists see themselves as "sentientists" where the term humanism contrasts with theism and does not describe the sole focus of humanist concerns. Sentiocentrism stands in opposition to the philosophy of anthropocentrism.[3]
The 18th-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham was among the first to argue for sentiocentrism. He maintained that any individual who is capable of subjective experience should be considered a moral subject.[4] Members of species who are able to experience pleasure and pain are thus included in the category. In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham made a comparison between slavery and sadism toward humans and non-human animals:
The late 19th- and early 20th-century American philosopher J. Howard Moore, in Better-World Philosophy (1899), described every sentient being as existing in a constant state of struggle. He argued that what aids them in their struggle can be called good and what opposes them can be called bad. Moore believed that only sentient beings can make such moral judgements because they are the only parts of the universe which can experience pleasure and suffering. As a result, he argued that sentience and ethics are inseparable and therefore every sentient piece of the universe has an intrinsic ethical relationship to every other sentient part, but not the insentient parts.[5] Moore used the term "zoocentricism" to describe the belief that universal consideration and care should be given to all sentient beings; he believed that this was too difficult for humans to comprehend in their current stage of development.
Other prominent philosophers discussing or defending sentiocentrism include Peter Singer,[6] Tom Regan,[7] and Mary Anne Warren.[8]
Sentiocentrism posits that sentience is the necessary and sufficient condition in order to belong to the moral community.[9] Other organisms, therefore, aside from humans are morally important in their own right.[10] According to the concept, there are organisms that have some subjective experience, which include self-awareness, rationality as well as the capacity to experience pain and suffering.[11]
There are sources that consider sentiocentrism as a modification of traditional ethic, which holds that moral concern must be extended to sentient animals.[12]
Peter Singer provides the following justification of sentiocentrism:Utilitarian philosophers such as Singer care about the well-being of sentient non-human animals as well as humans. They reject speciesism, defined by Singer as a "prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species". Singer considers speciesism to be a form of arbitrary discrimination similar to racism or sexism.[13] [14]
In the animal kingdom, there is a gradation in the nervous complexity taking examples from the marine sponges that lack neurons, intestinal worms with ~ 300 neurons or humans with ~ 86 billion. While the existence of neurons is not sufficient to demonstrate the existence of sentience in an animal, it is a necessary condition.[15] Gradualist sentiocentrism proposes that the value of sentient beings is relative to their degree of sentience, which is assumed to increase with the cognitive, emotional and social complexity.