Hedge(hog)ing Your Bets: Animal Consciousness, Ethics and the Wager Argument

I want to begin fleshing out an argument I've been mulling over. It’s far from a comprehensive thesis. Rather, I want to use this blog to sketch out some preliminary ideas. The argument takes off from the notion that whether or not animals are conscious informs the importance of human-animal interaction and dictates the course of animal ethics.

A hedgehog struggling to remain conscious... 

I want to explore the idea that treating animals as if they are conscious carries moral weight from the perspective of a cost-benefit analysis. The “wager argument” starts with the premise that we have a choice to treat animals either as if they are conscious or as if they are not. I will assume for now that consciousness includes the capacity to feel physical and emotional sensations, such as pain and pleasure, from a familiar first-person perspective (I’m strategically evading the problem of defining consciousness for now but I’m fully aware of its spectre- see below).

Animal's wagering. Not what I'm talking about.

The argument looks something like this: you are better off treating animals as if they are conscious beings, because if they are indeed conscious beings you have done good, but if they are not conscious beings then you have lost nothing. Alternatively, if you treat animals as if they are not conscious, and they are, you have caused harm. It is better to hedge your bet and assume animals are conscious.

To paraphrase Pascal, the argument says “if you gain you gain much, if you lose you lose little”. With Pascal’s wager your gain is something like eternal life, and the loss is avoidable annihilation. Some might include in the avoidance or progression to hell (though Pascal himself never mentions hell). For us, the gain is a better world, or the avoidance of a worse one.

Pascal.  I'll wager he Blaised his way through academia... (sorry).

Here's the argument in boring step-by-step premises:

P1 An animal is a being that is conscious or is not conscious.
P2 We may treat an animal as if they are conscious or as if they are not conscious.
P3 Treating a conscious being as if it is conscious or as if it is not conscious bares morally significant differences.
P4 Treating an animal as if it is not conscious and it is conscious will (practically) bare morally significant harm.
P5 Treating an animal as if is not conscious and it is not conscious will bare no morally significance difference.
P6 Treating an animal as if it conscious and it is not conscious will bare no or negligible morally significant difference.
P7 Treating an animal as if it conscious and it is conscious will (practically) bare morally significant good- or at the very least will bare no moral significance.
P8 We ought to behave in a way that promotes morally significant good, or at least avoids morally significant harm.
C We ought to treat animals as if they are conscious.

Note that by “practically” I mean that it does not necessarily follow as a logical result, but follows as a real-world likelihood.

The argument assumes that whether we think an animal is conscious or not makes a big difference to the way we ought to treat them. It also assumes that treating them as not conscious will lead to harm. How we flesh out "harm" is going to depend on our moral framework, and I think this argument most obviously fits into a consequentialist paradigm.

Regardless I think the idea pretty intuitive. If you believe your dog has the capacity for physical and emotional sensation, you are likely to treat her differently than if you think her experience of the world is much the same as a banana. Within medical testing, we may afford those animals we believe to be reasonably attributed consciousness with greater caution regarding harmful experiments. We may altogether exclude conscious beings from butchery, or at least any practice that might be painful. More radically, we may believe that any being we regard as conscious should be afforded the same sort of moral attention as humans. What matters is a “significant difference”- and this needs examined.

The premises obviously need to be elaborated upon, and I already have my own serious criticisms. Two in particular stand out: the problem of treating consciousness as simple and binary; and the assumption in premise 6 that treating animals as if they are conscious, when in fact they are not, will not result in morally significant harm (e.g. think of potential medical breakthroughs via “painful” animal experimentation or the health benefits of a diet that includes animal protein). I do believe the wager argument has strength to fight back against such criticisms but I don’t think it will come away unscathed. In the near future I’ll look at the argument in a little more detail and start examining these criticisms.   

"To Squeak and To Squeak Well Are Two Different Things"

 I'm not very much fun at parties. In a recent discussion I overheard regarding a friend's pet guinea pig and their “speaking” to another, I didn't have the sense to ignore it, but decided to ruin a perfectly amiable encounter into a debate about animal communication in which everyone left feeling no more satisfied with life.

On a number of occasions, mostly amongst non-philosophers, I've noticed a common response to a denial of language amongst non-human animals is a dismissive “well how do you know!?”. In an accusatory tone, they question how you could possibly think yourself so arrogant as to make claims about the inner workings of a small furry yet impenetrably mysterious rodent. As a matter of fact I think there's a large consensus amongst most philosophers and scientists that the vast majority, and probably all, non-human animal species are incapable of something equivalent to language (there is of course disagreement about the communicative abilities of primates and some other species). It's worth emphasising to people what is really being said, or not said, when claiming animals "aren't really speaking”, but instead partaking in other, admittedly complex, often not well understood forms of communication. 

It's important to realise that when I say guinea pigs don't have language, I'm not implying...

1. Cartesian Certainty. I don't know for 100% per cent, bet your sweet bippy that guinea pigs don't have language. Neither am I certain lampshades don't have language. Neither am I certain guinea pigs aren't made of cheese. But this sort of Cartesian doubt is as relevant to the question of language capacity, or inner mental activity of any kind, as it is to whether you're all in my head, or the world is a computer-simulated reality run by exploitative machines. In other words, it isn't relevant at all. Not to ordinary daily discourse. Hyperbolic doubt has its place, but it's not really a convincing argument against a particular theory. I don't know guinea pigs aren't really communicating in language, not for certain. But I believe they don't, based on certain inferences given certain empirical data. 

Neither am I saying...

2. Guinea pigs are rubbish. I'm under the impression that a common underlying feeling amongst layfolk is that by claiming animals aren't really “talking” when communicating, I'm somehow being disrespectful.That by denying them language I'm not only arrogant, but attacking their worth. It's as if not being able to communicate with language morally equates animals closer to a packet of Wotsits than a human. One clearly doesn't necessarily imply the other. Of course even if I did think that lack of language ability carried important moral ramifications (and truth be told I do think there is something to that thought), that wouldn't constitute an argument against my initial premise. It's just an implication you don't like.

Mr Tiddles. Less talk, more fluff.

The ascription of communicative abilities within other species must be an empirical question, in so far as once we've sorted out (theoretically) what we're looking for, it's an empirical question as to whether we find them in other species. If it's not, ultimately, an empirical question, I fail to see how we avoid naval gazing ponderment about what Mr Tiddles is really communicating to Fluffy Features.

I think the same extends to broader issues of mental life. Consciousness is an obviously more complex topic than language, lacking anything close to agreement on how we should use the word. But I do think that once we are more clear about what we're talking about, if we ever get there, ascription of consciousness will become more and more an empirical issue.

An important caveat: It is of course entirely possible that our empirical questions cannot practically be answered because of limits to our methods, or because we never manage to coherently establish the theoretical framework. Whilst whether or not Mr Tiddles is communicating in language is an empirical matter, it could be the case that we have insufficient means to pursue the investigation- though in fact with language we have some well established criteria. It is for more plausibly an issue with consciousness and its related issues. It strikes me that it is for insufficiencies within the theoretical understanding, and disagreements over empirical ground world, that we have so much disagreement e.g. with ascription of theory of mind to non-humans.

First Impressions of The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

(by Jonny)

In a recently fascinating move, various researchers at a meeting at Cambridge University, including cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists, signed a declaration voicing their support for the notion that homologous circuits and activity within non-human animal brains demonstrates consciousness. Any such exciting claim requires careful reading. Their declaration is summarazied thus:

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that  non-human  animals have the neuroanatomical,  neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

The problem with the declaration is that it is far too quick to throw around important words, like “affective states”, “emotions” and more importantly “consciousness” without carefully defining them. This isn’t pedantry, it is a necessity given the ambiguity of key concepts within the debate.

This photograph proves cats are much more like humans than first thought.

The idea of looking at neural correlates for demonstrating consciousness is interesting in itself, and I do think it has some value. The logic seems founded on the idea of looking at the neural activity when humans are performing or undergoing x (presumably taking x to involve some unquestionably “affective” or “emotional” state), then discovering some parallel activity in animal. But without much hint of their reasoning (and yes I understand this is just a declaration but this seems to me to be the keystone), the declaration takes this parallel activity to be obviously a sign of consciousness. In short, we need a good clear definition of consciousness before we start talking about it in important contexts. I’m not saying the signees are wrong in their conclusions, but that they are overly ambitious for a two page declaration, or out of touch with the necessities of the debate.

As an aside, here are my two favourite comments from the article about this on io9:

“ if science says this is correct, it is. end of story.”

And,

“Animals don't have souls or a conscience, they were put here on the Earth to serve man. This is the truth from the Lord our God himself as written in his Holy Bible.”

It’s nice to a see a variety of constructive opinion keeping the debate alive!