Abstract
Kelleyan Sentientism (KS) proposes a rigorous framework for grounding moral consideration in the capacity for sentience, defined as the capacity for conscious experience, including pain, pleasure, and awareness.
KS distinguishes between subjective and objective harm, emphasizing that beings may be morally considerable even when not actively experiencing consciousness.
This framework addresses critical gaps in traditional utilitarian and deontological approaches to vegan ethics, particularly the issue of temporarily unconscious or sedated beings.
This paper develops KS in detail, provides formal syllogistic structures for its arguments, examines counterfactuals, and contrasts it with conventional “pain/pleasure-only” sentience definitions, illustrating its superiority for coherent moral reasoning in vegan ethics.
Kelleyan Sentientism: The Capacity-Based Definition of Sentience
I. Expository Paragraph
Under the Kelleyan Sentientist model, sentience is not defined as the immediate, first-person subjective experience of awareness, but as the capacity for phenomenal conscious experience, grounded in neural and systemic architecture capable of sustaining such experience.
Neuroscientific research demonstrates that consciousness arises from specific neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), particularly the thalamocortical and posterior cortical networks (Koch et al., Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2016).
When these systems are temporarily suppressed — such as under anesthesia, sleep, or coma — subjective experience ceases, yet the organism retains the underlying capacity for consciousness (Laureys & Tononi, The Neurology of Consciousness, 2010; Browning & Birch, Philosophy Compass, 2022).
Therefore, sentience persists as a potential even in the absence of active experience. This distinction preserves moral consistency: it is impermissible to harm an unconscious or sedated being, precisely because their sentient capacity remains intact. If sentience were instead defined only as active experience, then temporarily unconscious humans (asleep, anesthetized, or comatose) would lose all moral status during those states — a position that is both ethically untenable and logically absurd. Thus, sentience must be understood as capacity, not transitory subjective state.
II. Formal Syllogism: “Sentience as Capacity”
P1. Sentience is the property that grounds moral considerability.
P2. If sentience were defined solely as active subjective experience, then unconscious or sedated beings would lack sentience.
P3. It is morally impermissible to harm unconscious or sedated beings.
C. Therefore, sentience must be defined as the capacity for conscious experience, not merely the active experience itself.
III. Secondary Syllogisms
For P1 — Sentience Grounds Moral Consideration
P1.1. Moral status attaches to beings capable of experiencing or undergoing harm or benefit.