Thread: Dream and Fantasy Morals

Originally Posted by mzungu

BTW the term sentience refers to being able to feel pain.

It does?

Originally Posted by Sageous

It does?

Yes Sageous. From the wiki:

Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as "qualia"). In Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that requires respect and care. The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights, because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, and thus is held to confer certain rights.

If we are to answer the question of whether DCs deserve moral consideration, the first thing we must establish is whether DCs can suffer. If they can suffer then the argument for consideration grows stronger. Sentience often gets conflated with the word intelligence, but at its root it only refers to the ability to suffer. The intelligence of DCs is another question... but I would say that they exhibit sufficient intelligence for us to consider then an intelligence similar to our own.