Citation

Author Website

www.kristinandrews.org

Commentary Type

Invited Commentary

Thread

Andrew Crump, Heather Browning, Alex Schnell, Charlotte Burn, and Jonathan Birch, Sentience in decapod crustaceans: A general framework and review of the evidence

Abstract

The eight criteria proposed in Crump et al.’s framework for evaluating pain sentience in decapod crustaceans are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to markers that could increase confidence in an animal’s sentience more generally. Some of the commentaries have already pointed out that pain is only one kind of sentience (Souza Valente). It has also already been pointed out that there are other criteria for pain that could be usefully added to the framework’s eight (Burrell). This expansive thinking about criteria that can be used to increase confidence in sentience raisess the question: in an expansive framework for evaluating sentience generally, will there be any animals we could study where confidence wouldn’t be increased were we to use a general model of evaluating sentience via marker frameworks? I consider how the general approach could increase confidence in the sentience of animals such as C. elegans and Porifera.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Kristin Andrews is York Research Chair in Animal Minds and Professor of Philosophy. She is leading a 5-year SSHRC project on Animal Social Norms. Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1737