Sentience and the Issue of Animal Welfare

Abstract In this article, I discuss a precondition of moral consideration that sets the bar lower at sentience. The popular sentience thesis identifies the capacity to feel pain as its condition of consideration. By appealing to the capacity to feel, it is possible to address some fundamental questions about anthropocentrism such as a threat to sentient animals in factory farming and unnecessary experimentation on nonhuman animals. This article interrogates the issue of animal welfare and exposes how discussions on moral considerations focusing on animal sentience exclude non-sentience animals from public welfare policy. While the sentience thesis is a well-established approach in the animal welfare literature, I argue that it lacks robust normative force and, as such, is inadequate for promoting animal welfare since it forces fragmentation of our moral life.