For many modern philosophers it is central, because sentience, the ability to feel, has become the main test of whether a being counts morally at all, and the evidence that many animals are sentient has widened the circle of beings owed care. Therapeutic Shamanism sees it differently, because in animism there is no ranking of beings; animals are the Animal People, our kin, and everything, plants and stones included, is alive, conscious and deserving of respect, so the question it asks is less “Is this being sentient enough to count?” than “How do we live in right relationship with it?”
What does it mean for a being to count morally? #
Philosophers speak of ‘moral status’, meaning whether a being’s own interests matter, so that we owe something to it directly, not just because of what it means to us. For most of Western history the answer for animals was no, or very little, and the line between humans and animals was drawn to keep it that way. Since the late eighteenth century, sentience has become the usual place to redraw it.
How did Western philosophy draw the line between humans and animals? #
Mostly by finding something humans have that animals were said to lack, such as reason, language or a soul. The philosopher René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, held that animals have no soul and are a kind of machine, so that an animal’s scream is a mechanical reaction, not an expression of pain.1 The philosopher Immanuel Kant held that we have only indirect duties to animals, since cruelty to them damages our own character. “Animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.”2
The historian Keith Thomas observed that the many definitions of ‘man’ share one feature, in that they “assume a polarity between the categories ‘man’ and ‘animal’”, and “invariably regard the animal as the inferior.”3
The philosopher Gary Steiner, in Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents (2005), traces how the line hardened. Earlier Greek writers such as Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras and Empedocles, he finds, saw living things as sharing a common basic nature, and drew their main divide between mortal and immortal beings, not between humans and animals; the turn against that sense of continuity came with Aristotle and the Stoics, who denied reason to animals.4 The philosopher Jacques Derrida pointed out that the list of things said to belong to humans alone, from speech and reason to laughing, mourning and burial, is never closed, and that to speak of ‘the Animal’ in the singular is to lump together what is really “a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living”.5
Why has sentience become the test? #
Because of a question asked by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1789. “The question is not Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?”6 If what matters is the ability to feel pain and pleasure, then the old dividing lines of reason and language fall away. In the 1970s the philosopher Peter Singer built on Bentham in Animal Liberation (1975), arguing that to give less weight to an animal’s suffering simply because of its species is a prejudice, ‘speciesism’, a word coined by the psychologist Richard Ryder. The philosopher Tom Regan, in The Case for Animal Rights (1983), held that animals who are what he called subjects of a life have rights of their own.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum takes a different route, asking what each kind of creature needs to flourish. In her view, “Each form of life is worthy of respect, and it is a problem of justice when a creature does not have the opportunity to unfold its (valuable) power, to flourish in its own way, and to lead a life with dignity.” She, too, treats sentience as the minimum for a creature to be owed justice.7 The law has begun to follow. In November 2021 a review for the UK government by the philosopher Jonathan Birch and four colleagues recommended that all cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans, from octopuses, squid and cuttlefish to crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimps and prawns, be recognised as sentient in UK animal welfare law.8 The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 names them, with all vertebrates, as sentient animals for its purposes, and sets up an Animal Sentience Committee to report on how government policy takes their welfare into account; it does not itself add new welfare protections.9
Do the philosophers agree? #
Not on everything. One argument is about degrees. Following the philosopher James Rachels, Nussbaum holds that the complexity of a creature’s life shapes what can harm it.10 Daniel Dennett suggests that many animals may feel pain without suffering as we do, whilst warning that this conclusion is suspiciously convenient for us, and that we should be on the lookout for “sources of illusion” on both sides.11 The ethologist Marc Bekoff replies that degrees of sentience make little practical difference to how we should treat animals, because “An individual’s pain is still pain.”12
Another is about what to do whilst the science is unsettled. As a general rule for attributing minds, Dennett holds that “The ethical course is to err on the side of overattribution, just to be safe”, even though the scientific course does the opposite.13 Birch, writing about bees and other insects, reaches a similar place, that “we should err on the side of caution and take proportionate measures to safeguard the welfare of the animals concerned.”14
A third questions the whole approach. The philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen, in Animal Lives and Why They Matter (2023), thinks that when everything hangs on which capacities an animal has, “the animal disappears”, and that a being does not need to be a moral agent to be owed moral concern. In his words, “One does not have to be a moral agent in order to be a moral addressee.”15
Steiner makes a related point. In his view, utilitarians such as Singer, rights theorists such as Regan and virtue ethicists all base moral worth on how sophisticated a being’s inner life is, so that animals end up compared unfavourably with humans on the very measures meant to include them. He proposes setting kinship beside capacities, a kinship based on “the shared struggle of different natural kinds to realize their potential for growth or development”, so that it might even be possible to feel kin to Hume’s oyster, which seems to have no sentience at all.16 The philosopher Josephine Donovan, in Animals, Mind, and Matter (2022), writing from the ethics of care, sees animals as subjects who show, in their own ways, how they wish to be treated. Care theory, she writes, holds that “insofar as possible we should treat the animal as she wishes to be treated”, and the question to ask an animal is the one the philosopher Simone Weil asked of suffering people: “What are you going through?”17
What does Therapeutic Shamanism teach? #
That there is no ranking of beings at all. Animism is a spiritual round table, where all beings are equal and treated with respect, and humans are not seen as better or more evolved than any other. “Humans are not superior to animals. Animals are not superior to plants and stones. Everything is equal and deserving of equal respect, not just when journeying, but in day-to-day life.”18 Humans are the youngest of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, not the highest, and “This is not about hierarchy, but about family.”19 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Therapeutic Shamanism also sees the ranking of sentience as part of the problem. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari points out, for hunter-gatherers the fact that humans hunted sheep did not make sheep inferior to humans, any more than tigers hunting humans made humans inferior to tigers. When farming began, farmers saw themselves as owning plants and animals. “To justify this, other beings were ‘downgraded’ in terms of their sentience, or even denied sentience altogether. And as ‘property’ other beings had no rights.”20 The same story still runs through modern culture, in which “Our fellow animals are seen as less conscious than us, and so do not merit the same rights as us.”21 It is part of the myth of human supremacy, from the time when “We elevated ourselves to gods, deciding what lives and what dies, and lost our compassion and empathy for the non-human.”22 See What is the myth of human supremacy? and Who is Derrick Jensen, and what is the myth of human supremacy?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism differ from the philosophers? #
Sentience-based ethics widened the circle a long way, and it has changed laws and lives. Most of it still stops at sentient beings, though, so that plants and stones are usually left outside. Animism draws no line. Plants are not less conscious than us; “Rather, it is because they have a different kind of consciousness.”23 Many of these philosophers reject ranking among the beings inside the circle. Nussbaum denies any natural ranking of forms of life, and Singer and Regan argue for equal consideration. Some of the tests used in practice, such as the mirror test, still put the beings most like us at the top, because self-awareness is the only kind of consciousness most people recognise.
Even those who widen the circle furthest usually keep a line somewhere. Steiner holds that the consciousness of most animals is confined to the present, or perhaps the very near future, and works without concepts, which he ties to language. Donovan holds that our ethical obligations are in the end to those who can make known how they wish to be treated, and that animals, which move about and choose, have “qualitatively more intense forms of consciousness and feeling than do plants”, though plants too are owed respect.24
Some of the newer work moves in a similar direction. A group of twenty-four researchers led by the ecologist Arian Wallach holds that all sentient animals are persons, taking personhood out of human-only hands and tying it to respect, not to rational capacities. For them, “Personhood, in an ethical sense, implies an entity is owed respect and should not be treated as a means to other ends.”25 They note that many traditions, hunting-based cultures among them, have long understood the world as full of persons with whom humans form kinship relations; their own aim is to change how conservation is practised. The philosopher Vinciane Despret, following the scholar Donna Haraway, suggests that it is not killing as such that has led to exterminations, but turning beings into things that may be killed.26 Therapeutic Shamanism would add that respect does not wait on proof of a mind like ours. It comes from relationship, from knowing other beings as kin, learning from them and giving thanks.
Does this mean animists do not kill or eat animals? #
Hunter-gatherers hunted, and every animal lives by eating other beings, plants included. On what anyone should eat, the published teaching takes no position, calling the ethics of what we eat “an interesting and indeed important conversation” and setting it aside as a middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer issue.27 What it does describe, in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer hunting journey and in its account of how our hunter-gatherer ancestors hunted, is how a kill is honoured, with respect and gratitude, using every part of the animal. It does ask everyone to notice how a world without human supremacy would feel, and to ask, “How would that awareness change the food that you eat, the products that you use, the job that you do?”28 And it asks those who practise shamanism to give back, because “It is a nonsense to ask for help from animals and plants in journeys, and then ignore their plight in this physical world and do nothing to help.”29 See What does animism say about killing and eating? and What is right relationship and reciprocity?
