Sentiocentrism and Antispeciesism: Philosophical Foundations, Wild Animal Suffering, and Its Tensions with Environmental Ethics
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| פורמט: | artículo original |
| סטטוס: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de Publicación: | 2025 |
| תיאור: | This article examines the philosophical foundations of sentiocentrism as a criterion of moral status, the conceptual architecture of the antispeciesism that follows from it, and the tensions that this same consequence generates when it extends beyond domesticated and institutionally exploited animals to reach the suffering of wild animals. It is argued that, if sentience —understood as the capacity to experience positive or negative affective states— is the necessary and sufficient condition for an individual's interests to merit moral consideration, then speciesism, as an arbitrary discrimination grounded in species membership, lacks the same rational justification now denied to racism or sexism, regardless of whether that discrimination is articulated from a utilitarian framework of interest-weighing or from a deontological framework of inviolable rights. From this starting point, the article examines the main dimensions of the institutional exploitation of nonhuman animals —dietary, biomedical, and recreational— as well as the problem, less explored by the tradition but equally demanded by the coherence of the principle of equal consideration, of the suffering that wild populations endure from entirely natural causes, and the dilemma between the duty of assistance that such suffering would seem to impose and the systemic risks of any large-scale intervention in ecosystems. Finally, it discusses the tension that this sentiocentric extension generates with the ecological holism dominant in contemporary environmental ethics, and assesses to what extent the abolition of institutional animal exploitation can be understood as one further stage, rather than the endpoint, of the historical expansion of the moral circle. To this end, it starts from a non-anthropocentric sentiocentrism that takes the capacity to suffer, rather than rationality or language, as the relevant threshold of the moral community. |
| País: | Portal de Revistas UNA |
| מוסד: | Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica |
| Repositorio: | Portal de Revistas UNA |
| שפה: | Español |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.revistas.una.ac.cr:article/23017 |
| גישה מקוונת: | https://www.revistas.una.ac.cr/index.php/praxis/article/view/23017 |
| מילת מפתח: | sentiocentrism antispeciesism moral status moral statusenvironmental ethics wild animal suffering sentiocentrismo antiespecismo estatus moral sufrimiento animal silvestre ética ambiental |