Jonathan Birch
speaker
151 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Jonathan Birch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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you know, things like that, where, yeah, there's a very wide range of reasonable views one might have where you can converge on the need to take precautions.
Well, no, or any dicapod crustacean, I think. We did a big review in 2021 that influenced the law in the UK community, on these issues. And yeah, as part of that review, we reviewed evidence that it takes two to three minutes a lot of the time for the crab or lobster to die. And in that time, there's this storm of nervous system activity as there would be in your pet cat or in any other animal.
So it's a prolonged extreme slaughter method. It seems like everyone should be able to see the risk there and see the problem and see the need for common sense precautions. You might not think the response is to ban eating crabs and lobsters. You might think that the right response is to mandate stunning of some kind.
And those debates about proportionality, I think are absolutely central right across the family of cases at the edge of sentience. But everyone should be able to agree on the need to do something.
Yes, well, and I think that's a very widespread view. And what I'm looking for in the book are points of consensus. So realistic range of possibilities in the scientific domain, but also points of overlapping consensus in the ethical domain as well. And I think that duty to avoid causing gratuitous suffering, either intentionally or through recklessness or negligence,
through just not caring, I think people from any reasonable ethical starting point can agree on that and then use that to guide the way we think about these cases where we have sentience candidates.
I think that principle is so weak in a way, it's so thin, the duty to avoid causing gratuitous suffering Where gratuitous implies the absence of any adequate reason for what you're doing. I think because it is so deliberately thin, it then can command genuine consensus. And then, of course, a lot of people want to go beyond that and say our duties are much stronger.
And I guess I do think this in my own life, but... For the purpose of formulating public policy, it's good to have these quite thin principles. And I think that's one of them. Yeah, okay, good.
Yeah. I hope that we don't have to. What I'm skeptical of is the idea of there being a sort of technocratic solution to this, where if we just find the right currency... And I suppose you have a policy on the table where some people working in the shellfish industry will be disadvantaged. Maybe their costs will go up because you're going to force them to stun the animals before killing them.
And the stunners cost money. And then the question is, well, how do you weigh the suffering of the... ah, you know, my livelihood has been made more difficult versus the crab spending the two minutes in the boiling water. And I think there's no technocratic common currency that will give us one size fits all answers to this kind of thing.
What I propose in the book is that democratic, inclusive deliberation and discussion is the way forward here. And I'm quite an advocate of citizens assemblies as the kind of model that we can use for this whole set of issues at the edge of sentience, where they're issues that, well, they call for judgments of proportionality.
There will naturally be disagreements in a pluralistic democratic society about what is proportionate to these risks. And the way we can resolve those value conflicts is democratically through citizens' assemblies.
We do, yeah, not just to crabs, yes. And often to many animals that are widely regarded as sentient, so pigs, chickens, for example, it's quite clear that widespread recognition of a particular species as sentient does not lead people immediately to behavioural change and does lead to lots of gratuitous suffering still being caused. So my focus in this book is on the edge cases, as it were.
But, you know, even in those core cases, we do need discussion about, well, how are we going to change the way we treat these animals?
Well, particularly the UK's Animal Welfare Sentience Act of 2022, my team ended up having some influence on because we were commissioned to produce a report of the evidence of sentience in cephalopod mollusks and decapod crustaceans, so octopuses, crabs, lobsters, shrimps. And basically the government had...
produced this bill that creates a duty on policymakers to consider the animal welfare impacts of their actions, which I think is a pretty good idea. And in drafting it, they needed to say something about the scope of the bill, because you've got to say which animals. Do you have an obligation to consider plankton, microscopic animals? Is it just pets or what?
And they came up with a draft that included all vertebrates and which on the plus side included fishes, which it should, but on the negative side excluded all invertebrates, which led to some criticism from animal welfare groups.
So the government ended up commissioning a team led by me to produce a review of the evidence concerning those two particular groups of invertebrates, and we recommended that they amend the bill to extend the duty to them. And they did. So we got something, you know, we got our central recommendation implemented.
Now we put a lot of other recommendations in the report as well, which have not been implemented. And so we're still pushing for action on a lot of these issues, but that basic point that the sentience of octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, crabs, lobsters was recognized in UK law. That's something.
I think we're mammal chauvinists a lot of the time. I mean, human chauvinists the most, then mammals. And then sometimes you can get people to take fishes seriously and they still will neglect the interests of invertebrates. So I think really we need to be yet more inclusive.
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