New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness
Consciousness may be fake, and it may not matter all that much (also this), but you shouldn’t be too confident in either of those suspicions. There is an asymmetry: if you care about consciousness, and it turns out it’s fake or unimportant, you’ve made a mistake, but not a morally very serious one.1 If you don’t care about consciousness, and it turns out to be both real and important, then you’ve made a mistake with real moral costs. In other words, false negatives are worse than false positives. This line of reasoning has motivated arguments from risk and precautionary principles in recent years (see e.g. Birch; Sebo), and some burden-of-proof shifting in the philosophy of animal cognition (see e.g. Andrews and Huss; Mikhalevich).
I have my doubts about this approach. I think precautionary principles are often misguided, both in their formulation and application, but I believe inductive risk and risk asymmetries are a thing. I’m increasingly inclined toward the view that consciousness may be an illusion (R.I.P., Daniel Dennett), or a lot less transparent, coherent, and fundamental than most philosophers think, and not completely coincidentally (though in principle independently), it’s not all that important. Still, you should treat the putative (with varying degrees of confidence) consciousness of other creatures as a potentially very significant matter.
And so, even though I have my doubts, these considerations have led me to sign the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. The Declaration is admirably succinct (though if you want to geek out, there is background).
Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.
First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.
Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).
Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.
The Declaration was announced at a recent conference at New York University (coincidentally right when the world learned of Dennett’s passing, as it turned out) and originally written and co-signed by a few dozen philosophers and scientists. Since then many more have added their name, myself included.
If you believe you have relevant expertise, I encourage you to sign it too. Mainly this is because we are talking about the lives of trillions of animals every year whose welfare is fully discounted, in no small part because we believe they are not conscious. If, as seems plausible to me, beliefs about their consciousness, or lack thereof, is part of the explanation for their neglect or abuse, then it seems instrumentally valuable to uphold the very live possibility that they are sentient. Am I suggesting we should manufacture scientific consensus in the pursuit of moral goals? No. As I said, inductive risk is real, and so the non-epistemic costs (moral, social, and otherwise) of error are relevant to the standards of evidence we accept. Impossibly high standards and human-centered paradigms for the study of consciousness carry morally significant risks. It may turn out that consciousness is fake and/or insigificant. But I don’t know for sure, and the evidence for consciousness in a wide range of animals is hard to dismiss (whatever ‘consciousness’ turns out to pick out).
In fact, we may be reaching a point where it is more reasonable to start from a defeasible presumption that animals are conscious absent evidence to the contrary. Kristin Andrews argues for such a presumption in a recent paper, “‘All animals are conscious’: shifting the null hypothesis in consciousness science.” Andrews is one of the leading philosophers of animal cognition and one of the authors and original co-signers of the Declaration.2
So there you have it. Consciousness may be fake or insignificant. But until we figure this out, assume it’s at least kinda real and somewhat important and present in a wide range of animals. Because whatever the truth about consciousness, these animals likely matter.
It’s complicated. If we overhauled our animal-involving practices based on that false assumption, and this involved tremendous economic costs that cannot be offset, the moral costs would not be insignificant since this could be a net loss for human or animal welfare. I am assuming that our assumption does not lead us to incur tremendous costs.
The Declaration includes, “at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects.” It doesn’t rule out bivalves (scallops, oysters, mussels, etc.) or gastropods (snails), though it doesn’t include them. There is some evidence that garden snails might be conscious. You don’t know, it depends on your theory! I have yet to see even remotely suggestive evidence that oysters could be conscious. The evidence I’ve seen suggests the opposite (here’s your defeater, your ‘evidence to the contrary’). Still, the welfare risk is not zero, and that is something worth taking into account.