S12. E5: Jeff Sebo: The Moral Circle: What Matters, Who Matters and Why?

My pleasure, thank you for having me.

My name is Jeff and I am an Environmental Studies professor at New York University. My background is in philosophy, but I now work in an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented department, so we do a lot of work related to animals and the environment — like what are animals in the environment, how do humans interact with them, can we improve our interactions with them. And I especially do a lot of work through some centers that we have there: a Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. We do research and other activities about important issues at the intersection of environmental and animal protection, so a lot of work related to agriculture and its impact on farmed animals and public health and the environment, and a lot of work related to conservation and how it interacts with wild animals and biodiversity. And then I also work with a center called Mind, Ethics, and Policy, which is connected to the book. This center examines the nature and intrinsic significance of non-human minds — so which animals, which non-humans in general, are conscious, sentient, agential, morally significant? What do we owe them? How can we build a shared society that treats them with the appropriate level of moral concern? So I do a lot of research and outreach and other activities related to those topics.

I was there at the founding, but cannot take credit for the founding. It was started in around 2010 by my colleague Dale Jamieson. He retired just this year, and I was the very first postdoc they hired, so I got to be there year one to help build the very first undergraduate classes in animal minds and animal ethics, and that was a great way for me to pivot immediately in that direction right out of grad school and work full-time on these topics.

I was very lucky.

The Moral Circle.

The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why.

The robot, yeah. This was in 2022, actually. The very same month that the Happy case was being decided, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made public allegations that a language model at Google at the time called LaMDA had become sentient and deserved moral and legal protections. And that was one of the first major news stories surrounding AI sentience that we have had in the modern AI era.

Yeah, so the book opens with Happy the elephant, as you say, which is one of the most charismatic animals who humans are most likely to see as morally significant and deserving of moral, legal, political protections. And yet even with Happy, we struggle to have her legal personhood recognized, her legal rights recognized. She remains in captivity in obviously not ideal conditions for her. And so a question that I often receive when I talk about rights for insects or AI systems or microscopic organisms one day is, why are we thinking about this when we struggle to even get equal protection for fellow humans, to say nothing of the very most charismatic non-human animals like chimpanzees and elephants? And I think that is fair. We can obviously only do so much; we do need to prioritize. And so we can talk about it in more detail, but at a first approximation, what I would say is that we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Of course we need to be fighting for basic human rights, basic animal rights. We need to achieve legal personhood for that first elephant, that first chimpanzee. But in the meantime, we can start to ask questions about, start to problematize our assumptions about these other more distant non-humans like insects, like AI systems, because we are scaling up our uses of them too. While we fight for rights for elephants and chimpanzees, we are scaling up an insect farming industry that already farms a trillion insects per year and could farm as many as 50 trillion a year by the end of the decade, and scaling up AI development where in a decade or two decades we could have entire virtual worlds filled with virtual minds. And so if we wait until later to think about these issues, we could stumble into even higher scale, even bigger versions of the exploitation than we currently see with cows and pigs and chickens and fishes. So we need to think ahead while we fight for those basic rights for those who are closer to us.

The moral circle is a concept for who is in our moral community. To whom do we have moral responsibilities? So obviously a lot of different beings, a lot of different entities have value of various kinds, including value for humans, right? Nature, plants and fungi and ecosystems have enormous value for us — aesthetic value, we find them beautiful; cultural value, they relate to our cultural practices; economic, ecological value, we can extract financial value from them; we breathe the air, drink the water. But the present question is which beings have value for themselves? Which beings intrinsically matter for their own sakes? And that is a difference, right? I should protect my car because I benefit from my car, but I should protect my cat because my cat benefits from that. And so the question that this book asks is which beings are in the same category as my cat? Which beings can be benefited and harmed and intrinsically matter for their own sakes, and we owe them protection for them, not just for us.

Yeah, in a way it institutionalizes it. It places a marker and gives institutional reality to moral progress that may have already been made or may be in process. So you are absolutely right that we have gradually over time, too slowly but gradually over time, expanded our conception of who matters morally and recognize that, for example, racism is morally arbitrary and wrong, sexism is morally arbitrary and wrong, and we still have more of those battles to fight within our own species. And then, as you said, at a certain point we reach a critical mass and a view becomes widely enough accepted that it can then be reinforced by the law, and individuals can be recognized as legal persons with legal rights where they were previously excluded from the legal community. And that is part of what, for example, the Nonhuman Rights Project is fighting for right now, and other legal advocates. They are saying we have made a sufficient amount of moral progress with respect to consideration for animals like captive elephants and chimpanzees, and we can now recognize that they do have all the capacities and features required for legal personhood, for minimal legal recognition, and so we should be able to recognize through courts when injustices are perpetrated against them.

Oh, and you see this even in legal arguments in courtrooms and in court decisions about these cases. So for example, if you go read the majority opinion in the Happy the elephant case, or if you read any of the comment surrounding the Kiko and Tommy chimpanzee case from a few years prior to Happy the elephant, you see a lot of arguments that on their face are not good arguments, and what must be motivating them is a fear about a slippery slope, a fear about what comes next. Because everybody recognizes that these two captive chimpanzees matter and deserve recognition, that this captive elephant matters and deserves recognition, but people appreciate that once you open the door to one non-human having one right, then you face the question: where does it end? What other rights does this non-human have? What other non-humans have rights? And will we need to recognize that farmed animals have a right to life, that wild animals have a right to security, that invertebrates have basic liberties too? And then that feels overwhelming, and then our entire legal system would be overwhelmed and overturned. And so we think we got to stop that from happening, so we will block it at the very start and not even allow this one non-human to have this one right. I do think that that is one of the most powerful motivators behind judges' reluctance to recognize the power of the Nonhuman Rights Project's arguments.

Some countries have recognized legal personhood. Ecuador, for example, has recognized rights of nature, and so there are places that recognize that either individual animals or natural systems can have at least limited rights, either for their own sakes or for the sake of humans and animals who depend on them. And obviously even in countries that have technical recognition of animal rights or rights of nature, it is not as though they treat animals and nature ideally well, right? Obviously passing this kind of law or making this kind of judgment in the court of law, this is a first step or a first step and not the last step. You still then need to change hearts and minds and cultural practices and traditions and have people actually recognize this in society, or else it will be a kind of symbolic statement on a piece of paper that makes no real-world impact.

Yeah, so my book is about many different topics, but a central theme of the book is that we have a long history of hierarchy and exclusion when it comes to drawing the scope of our moral circle. We keep allowing our bias to cause us to overestimate what it takes to matter and then underestimate who has what it takes, who has those features. So for example, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, many people thought you have to be a member of the species Homo sapiens to matter at all, or you have to have language and reason and be able to talk to me to matter at all. And more recently we recognize that no, maybe the ability to suffer is enough — that was too exclusionary, right? And then likewise, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, many people thought only humans or beings very much like us can suffer. Every other animal, they may look like they can suffer, but they are actually just a machine, just a soulless machine responding to cause and effect. But more recently we have realized, oh, sentience, the ability to suffer, it might be widespread in the animal kingdom. And so I think when we look at that history and when we look at our bias and ignorance and when we look at how important and how difficult these questions are — questions about consciousness, sentience, agency, moral significance — these are some of the hardest questions in science and philosophy. When we consider all of that together, I think it calls for humility. We might have our own current views about which features are required for you to be in the moral circle and about who has those features, but we should recognize we might be making mistakes, and we should cultivate a little bit of caution and humility and allow for the possibility that less is required or that more beings have these features than we currently think. And when we then go look at the current evidence with an open mind — and we can talk about the evidence if you want — but if we go look at the current evidence with an open mind, we realize, oh wow, there actually are a decent number of markers or indicators of consciousness, sentience, agency, moral significance as far away as insects and perhaps some near-future AI systems, which is unsettling, but I think a reality that we need to face.

Yeah, it would be shocking, shocking if we were the first generation in the history of human civilization to finally get all of these really hard questions right and draw exactly the right lines around who matters and give them exactly the right kind of recognition. We are probably making mistakes too. Our children, our children's children are going to look back at us with the same kind of embarrassment that we do with our grandparents, our great-grandparents. And so we should ask: what mistakes are we making that our children and our children's children are going to recognize? Some are obvious — well, yes, factory farming, the wildlife trade, deforestation — but there might be some new ones that even animal rights advocates are not really aware of yet, like the emergence of insect farming, like the emergence of AI development and deployment. Even for animal rights advocates, it might take a little bit of cognitive work to summon concern for those kinds of practices.

Yes, the numbers are not well known in part because insects, like many other animals, are not measured by the individual; they are measured by weight. But according to one estimate, as of a couple of years ago, we were already farming a trillion insects per year, and we were estimated to rise to about 50 trillion per year by the end of the decade. And part of that is because some humans do consume insect protein directly, and people are scaling up that use of insects. But much more, actually, the main driver of insect farming is actually pet food and then farmed animal feed. And this is a kind of irony at the heart of insect farming, because part of why insect farming is receiving a lot of investment is some people see it as a sustainable alternative to traditional animal agriculture, like beef and dairy agriculture, which is known to be environmentally disastrous in addition to bad for cows. But right now, insect farming is not really being used as an alternative to traditional animal agriculture, not really being used to displace it. It is instead being used to feed into it and give it a longer lifespan. And so this is problematic from an environmental and animal agriculture alternative perspective because it props up animal agriculture rather than replacing it. But I argue, and other people who work with me — a colleague, Jason Schukraft, and I have written about this previously — we argue that insect farming is concerning for another reason, which is that there are 50 trillion insect lives, and they may be able to experience at least flickers of consciousness or sentience. And if they do, insect farming is not any kinder to them than factory farming is to chickens or fishes. They are kept in these giant, giant containers, not tended to individually, often transported through tubes, and then killed through baking or freezing or shredding. That is obviously not going to be a pleasant experience if they are capable of experiences on some level.

Right, there is a presumption in science that the default is that you are not sentient until you are proven to be sentient, or until you are shown to be sentient by lots and lots of evidence. And so the kind of default assumption is non-sentience until sentience can be established. But I think for many of us in everyday life, that is not our default assumption. We reflexively walk around an insect rather than stepping on them because we kind of, for that brief moment, experience them as possibly having a little life that matters to them.

No, I mean, think about birds and bird brains. They may be small, they may objectively be small, but think about how smart, how sophisticated, how intelligent, how sensitive birds are. So this is an area where size is not really the primary determinant of how intelligent you are or what kind of capacity for welfare and happiness and suffering you can have.

Absolutely, yeah. Octopuses have sometimes been described as honorary vertebrates. So octopuses are invertebrates, that means no spinal column and the same kind of central nervous system that you find in humans and other vertebrates. But they are so obviously sensitive and intelligent and mysterious and remarkable that since the 90s they have been recognized as sentient beings in at least some governments, along with a limited class of vertebrates. For a while it was mammals and birds and octopuses, and even the other vertebrates — reptiles, amphibians, and fishes — we still have to fight for them in a way that had already happened to some extent for octopuses in the 90s, and then of course for other invertebrates too. So yeah, octopuses are an interesting case: intelligent and sensitive enough that despite how alien they are, people had compassion for them.