Non-reflective consciousness and our moral duties to non-reflective animals

Abstract

Many philosophers and scientists believe that animals can be conscious by virtue of possessing first-order perceptual representations, while having high-order representational capacities is not necessary for being conscious. In this paper I defend this view but argue that it reveals that there are two kinds of consciousness that depend on whether one is capable of high-order representations or not. I call these two kinds of consciousness reflective and non-reflective consciousness, respectively. Given that consciousness is crucial for the ascription of moral status to animals and for determining our moral duties to them, the distinction between these two kinds of consciousness turns out to have important normative implications. In the last part of this paper, I argue that our moral duties towards animals with moral status are generally stronger when they arise from reflective, rather than from non-reflective, animals.