Animal Slavery

[James2014]

In what way does your giving anything that is conscious rights rest on a rational basis? And how do you know what is and isn't conscious? Is a rat conscious? An octopus? A bacterium? A squid? A tree? Gaia?

Illicit major is a formal fallacy committed in a categorical syllogism that is invalid because its major term is undistributed in the major premise but distributed in the conclusion.

The only rational basis for our values is that they don't lead to contradictions. Valuing species does lead to contradictions. Consciousness does not.

If the animals are capable of binding together multiple sensory inputs to form a new representation of the world, then this suggests one is conscious. For example you can train a rat or a mouse to learn to associate a noise with a shock, but only in a cage with stripes on the walls and only in the afternoon. The rat has then taken information about the what where and when of events and created a new representation of the world. A drosophila for example can learn to associate an odour with a shock, but it is not able to bind together multiple sensory inputs to learn about the what where and when of events. So binding I would say is a good first criteria of consciousness.

Secondly, cognitive biases. First one can train an animal to associate a high pitched sound with a positive reward, and a low pitched sound with a negative reward. A normal animal will then respond to an ambiguous sound as if it was associated with a positive reward. An animal that had exposed to chronic unpredictable stress will however respond as if its associated with a negative reward. These experiments show that the animal's perception is affected by their emotional state, and that they therefore have subjective awareness, ie they are conscious.