Persons, Near-Persons, and the Merely Sentient
An Empirically Grounded Approach to Animal Welfare and Animal Rights

Part one: Hare's Two-Level Utilitarianism

CH 1: Introduction

§1 - Harey Animals
§2 - A Properly Philosophical Conception of Personhood
§3 - The Nature of Academic Philosophy
§4 - Methods of Justification in Philosophical Ethics
§5 - Hare's Two-Level Utilitarianism
§6 - Hare's Theory and the Naturalistic Fallacy
§7 - Incorporating Animal Welfare and Animal Rights into Hare's Theory
§8 - "Moral Standing" or "Moral Considerability" versus "Moral Significance"
§9 - Harean Reasons for Retaining the term "Person"

CH 2: Hare on the Logic of Moral Discourse

§1 - Universal Prescriptivism
§2 - The Golden Rule Argument for Utilitarianism
§3 - Prudence and Moral Judgement
(A) Rawls' Maximin Principle
(B) A Crucial Difference Between Harean Critical Thinking and Rawls' "Original Position"
(C) The Conceivability of "Perspective-Hopping"

§4 - Universalizability and Overridingness as Logical Properties of Moral Judgement
§5 - Prescriptivism and Morality as a System of Imperatives
(A) Assenting to an Imperative
(B) Imperative Inferences
(C) The Prescriptivity of Moral Judgements
(D) Historical Antecedents

§6 - A Formal Reconstruction of Hare's Argument
§7 - The Relevance of Facts in Universal Prescriptivist Discourse
§8 - The Kantian Ideal of a "Kingdom of Ends"

CH 3: The Nature of Intuitive Level System ("ILS") Rules

§1 - The Need for Intuitive Level Rules
§2 - Four Types of "Good" ILS Rules
(A) Common Morality
(B) Personal Morality
(C) Professional Ethics
(D) Laws

§3 - Some General Characteristics of ILS Rules
(A) A Benign form of Relativism
(B) A Degree of Conservative Bias or Inertia
(C) A Potentially Revolutionary Bent
(D) The Simplicity and Dispositional Nature of ILS Rules
(E) Comparison to "Intuition" and "Analysis" in the Expert Judgement Literature

§4 - Connectionism and ILS Rules
(A) Classical and Connectionist Models of Moral Reasoning
(B) Connectionist Systems
(C) Connectionism and the Role of Rules in Intuitive Level Thinking
(i) Education
(ii) "Context-Fixing"
(iii) "Collaborative Problem-Solving"

(D) Summary

CH 4: Assessing Hare's Theory


§1 - Assessing the Descriptive Adequacy of Hare's Theory
§2 - The Ubiquity of the Golden Rule
§3 - Prescriptivism and the Evolution of Utilitarianism
(A) The Adaptive Significance of Universal Prescriptivist Language
(B) Replies to Some Objections
(i) The importance of partiality towards members of one's own species
(ii) The population structure necessary for group selection to work
(iii) A still fitter logic of moral discourse?

(C) Summary

§4 - The Existence of Other Theories of Normative Ethics and Metaethics
§5 - The Compartmentalization Problem
§6 - Shedding Light on Some Real-World Controversies
§7 - Philosophical "Test Cases for Utilitarianism"
§8 - Hare's "Template" Response to Unrealistic Test Cases
§9 - Responding to More Realistic Test Cases
§10 - Promises and Rawls on the "Practic Conception" of Rules
§11 - Williams on Integrity and Utilitarianism
§12 - Summary Assessment of Hare's Theory

Part two: Sentience, Personhood, and Utilitarianism

CH 5: Which Animals are Sentient?

§1 - Sentience, Phenomenal Consciousness, and Pain
§2 - Animal Consciousness and Arguments by Analogy
§3 - The "Standard" Argument by Analogy Regarding Pain
§4 - Allen's Criticisms of the "Standard" Argument
(A) "The Rumsfeld Response" and Two Caveats
(B) Two Pain Pathways in Mammals
(C) An Evolutionary Fucntion for Phenomenally Conscious Pain?
(D) The "Standard" Argument, Updated

§5 - What Might Consciousness of Things other than Pain Do for an Organism?
(A) Does Instrumental Learning Require Consciousness?
(i) Trace Conditioning
(ii) Instrumental Conditioning in the Spinal Cord

(B) Examples of Operant Instrumental Learning

§6 - Conclusion

CH 6: Personhood and Biography

§1 - What Makes Humans Special?
§2 - Human Beings as Story-Tellers
§3 - Schechtman on Narrative Self-Constitution
(A) The Articulation and Reality Constraints
(B) The Four Features

§4 - A Working Hypothesis about Personhood and Language
§5 - Why Animal Language Studies Provide No Good Evidence of Personhood
(A) Great Apes
(B) Elephants and Cetaceans
(C) Parrots

§6 - Conclusion

CH 7: Moral Signficance and Autonoetic Consciousness

§1 - The Autonoetic Consciousness Paradigm
§2 - The Special Moral Significance of Autonoetic Consciousness
(A) The Argument from Conscious Memory and Conscious Anticipation
(B) The Argument from More Inclusive Desires

§3 - The Special Moral Significance of a Biographical Sense of Self
(A) The Argument from Conscious Memory and Conscious Anticipation (Again)
(B) The Argument from More Inclusive Desires (Again)
(C) Only Persons Have "Lives-as-a-Whole"

§4 - The "Intelligence is a Species-Specific Trait" Objection
§5 - The "Super-Aliens" Objection
§6 - The Problem of "Marginal Cases"

CH 8: Candidates for Near-Personhood

§1 - Studying Autonoetic Consciousness in Animals
§2 - Episodic Memory
(A) "Episodic-Like" Memory in Scrub Jays
(B) The Role of the Mammalian Prefrontal Cortex
(C) Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROCs) of Episodic Memory
(C) The Element of Surprise
(C) Mourning and Episodic Memory
(C) Summary

§3 - Mirror Self-Recognition
(A) Chimpanzees and Orangutans
(B) Dolphins
(C) Elephants
(D) Bonobos
(E) Orangutans
(F) Gorillas
(G) Other Primates
(H) Parrots

§4 - Use of a "Theory of Mind" (ToM) and Conscious Planning for the Future
(A) Use of ToM in Primates
(B) Use of ToM in Elephants
(C) Use of ToM in Dolphins
(D) Use of ToM in Scrub Jays
(E) Understanding the Pointing Gesture Involves ToM
(F) Tool Use and Planning for the Future

§5 - Candidates for Near-Personhood
(A) The Usual Suspects
(B) Some Other Contenders
(C) Preliminary Conclusions

§6 - "Near-Persons" versus "Borderline" and "Quasi-Persons"

Part three: Situating Animals in Hare's Two-Level Utilitarianism

CH 9: Formulating ILS Rules for Humans and Animals

§1 - Beyond "Type 1 Philosophy"
§2 - The "Don't Kill Sentient Beings" Principle
§3 - The Replaceability Argument for Slaughter-based Agriculture
§4 - Singer on Replaceabiity

(A) Singer on Personhood
(B) "Non-Replaceability" and "The Prior Existence View"
(C) "Non-Replaceability" and Long-term Preferences
(D) "Non-Replaceability" and Preferences as "Debits"
(E) "Non-Replaceability" and "Life's Uncertain Voyage"

§5 - Hare on Replaceability
(A) How the Total View is Entailed by the Logic of Moral Discourse
(B) Hare on Human Population Policy
(C) Hare on Animal Population Policy

§6 - Non-Replaceability as a Feature of ILS Rules
(A) The Problem of "Marginal Cases"
(B) Should Near-Persons be Regarded as Non-Replaceable?

CH 10: Humane Sustainable Agriculture

§1 - Envisioning Humane Sustainable Communities
§2 - "Animal Welfare" in the Animal Science Literature
§3 - Prelapsarian Visions
§4 - Contemporary Visions

(A) Slaughter Reform in the 20th Century
(B) The Sustainable Pork Certification Program
(C) The Cage-Free Poultry Movement and European-Style Reforms

§5 - Utopian Visions
(A) Demi-Vegetarianism
(B) Davis' Argument for Omnivory and the Special Value of Ruminants
(C) The Buffalo Commons Proposal Coupled with In-situ Slaughter

§6 - Conclusion

CH 11: Pets, Companion Animals, and Domesticated Partners

§1 - The Importance of Distinguishing Pets from Companions and Partners
§2 - What does it Mean to be a Pet?
§3 - Regulating the Keeping of Pets and Companion Animals
§4 - Pets v. Companion Animals
§5 - Companion Animals v. Domesticated Partners
§6 - Three Good ILS Rules Regarding Pets
§7 - Near-Persons as Pets?

CH 12: Science and the Environment

§1 - Holism and Environmental Ethics
§2 - Therapeutic Hunting

(A) Therapeutic Hunting of Obligatory Management Species
(B) Therapeutic Hunting of Near-Persons?

§3 - Endangered Species
§4 - Professional Ethics and Ecology
(A) Shedding Light on Questions about Codes of Professional Ethics
(B) The Ecological Society of America's Code

§5 - A Harean Perspective on Environmentalists' Intuitions
§6 - "Difficult Cases," Codes, and IACUCs

Conclusion

Bibliography