The study of animal behavior has come a long way since the era of BF Skinner and his cohorts. This brief excerpt shows current thinking on "Affective sentience and moral protection."

Anthropomorphism, understood as the mistaken attribution of human properties to nonhuman entities, is no less wrong than what deWaal  calls “anthropodenial,” or the mistaken failure to attribute a human property to nonhumans. It does not make sense to guard against one type of error but not the other. We agree with Sober that the solution is not an armchair preference for one kind of error, but a strategy for avoiding both in equal measure. The central error in both anthropomorphism and anthropodenial lies in assuming human beings to be the measure of all things—in other words, anthropocentrism.

One might wonder whether the quality-of-life approach can be usefully extended to invertebrates whose motivational states are especially difficult to read in their unfamiliar behaviors. Those who actually work with invertebrates do not find this difficulty insurmountable. Balcombe notes that the more we learn about arthropods like insects, the more we come to recognize their welfare. Researchers themselves are arguably the ones who are best positioned to map out the conditions under which these alien lives are well lived.

Affective sentience and moral protection
Russell Powell, Boston University
Irina Mikhalevich, Rochester Institute of Technology
RIT Scholar Works Articles. 1-9-2021

PLB

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