On Responsible Knowledge Making and the Moral Standing of Animals: Questioning What Matters and Why about Animal Minds

Abstract

One of the long-standing presuppositions of moral theory about animals is that our moral relations with them depend on our sharing some fundamental characteristic or capacity. Daniel Dennett's influential paper, 'Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why' (1995) is a good example of how philosophers might go on in discussions that takes seriously this kind of reasoning as well as a comment on what responsible knowledge making amounts to in relation to it. In this paper my aim is to question this kind of theorizing and suggest another way that philosophers might approach the animal question.