So let's talk today is actually part of a project that Russell are currently working on.
And this project and my talk today focuses on critters that don't often make an appearance in technical analysis.
Critters such as spiders, insects and molluscs.
I'm a philosophy of science by training.
I became interested in invertebrates when I was looking into how the concept of simplicity may have shaped approaches to the study of animal models.
Insects and spiders like the tiny jumping spider might appear to be paradigm examples of simple systems.
And so one might expect that their behaviour can be explained by equally simple mechanisms.
Until that is, you look closer.
It turns out that many of their behaviours which have been replicated in experiments with those of more sophisticated vertebrates.
Bioethics has had a lot to say about the treatment of vertebrates,
but has yet to make contact with the growing scientific evidence of invertebrate life.
And that's the subject of today's talk, especially as it concerns their treatment in scientific and biomedical research,
how invertebrates account for the vast majority of animals.
On some estimates, invertebrates account for or invertebrate animals account for roughly 90% of all animal species.
They range from the sessile and brainless C sponge to social learners such as bumblebees to flexible problem solvers like octopuses.
And yet, despite this diversity and despite their great numbers,
invertebrates as a group are generally excluded from all analysis and as a consequence, from experimental welfare protections.
And this is so despite the fact that invertebrates are dramatically overrepresented as research animals.
A recent exception has actually been made in some quarters for octopuses.
But even this moral accolade, in fact, betrays invertebrates centric analysis of approaches to animal welfare.
To the extent that invertebrates are considered at all in ethics.
This is limited primarily to the conservation context,
where their value is regarded as instrumental in terms of the ecological services that they provide.
And the exclusion of invertebrates as a category would be rational.
Were all invertebrates mindless biological automata?
Were they clearly ineligible for that reason for moral concern? But this is inconsistent with the evidence which presses us to consider what a more
comprehensive and scientifically engaged animal ethics and policy might look like.
So I'll start today by showing that the vertebrate invertebrate distinction that is traditionally
drawn in ethics and policy is evolutionarily unsound and possibly morally pernicious.
Next on Review the status of invertebrates in public policy and philosophical ethics.
And I'm going to suggest that this near-total exclusion of invertebrates is due to a combination of factors,
including cognitive biases which distort moral judgements about invertebrate welfare and false beliefs about the capabilities of tiny brains.
And finally,
I'll consider some normative worries that bringing invertebrates into the moral community could stretch the concept of moral standing too thin,
or that it could be too demanding of moral agents. The term vertebrate is biologically sound.
It refers to a group of animals that comprise a pilot vertebrate,
which are then characterised by segments, spinal column and cranium and close friends.
Given this, one might be forgiven for expecting its rhetorical counterpart invertebrates to be biologically sound as well.
This, you might not be surprised, is not the case. In fact, invertebrates are neither a proper clade nor a proper morphological brain.
They are not a proper clade because they don't share a single common ancestor that is not also shared with vertebrates.
For instance, the kind of terms such as sea stars and sea urchins, which are classic invertebrates,
are more closely related to vertebrates than they are to other invertebrates.
And so the category invertebrate doesn't pick out a natural evolutionary group.
The category invertebrate also doesn't represent a proper morphological grade of complexity.
All animals, vertebrates and invertebrates show the same amount of cellular differentiation and thus of complexity in their part.
Neither does the category reflect brain complexity.
Great features of the vertebrate body plants, just spines and craniums are not preconditions for complex breaks.
Some insects, spiders and crustaceans as well as molluscs lack these features, but they are both relatively large,
modular and fairly interconnected brains, depending on which animal we're talking about.
With a brain, differences between vertebrates and invertebrates make a world difference is a separate question,
and this is one that I'll get into shortly. So in short, the vertebrate invertebrate distinction fails as a biological concept.
Worse still,
it loads the vast diversity of non vertebrate animal life into a single category grouping creatures like the behaviourally flexible paperweights
whose tiny body contains complex centralised brain with filter feeding sea spiders that lack nervous and motor capacities altogether.
And this lemming indicates that the vertebrate invertebrate distinction might also fail as a moral concept.
And this leads into a deeper worry about the vertebrate invertebrate extinction,
namely its potential to distort moral analysis and policy, especially in the context of biomedical experimentation.
Now, a very general lesson emerging from the philosophical literatures on race,
gender and disability disease is that biological categories often carry implicit normative connotations that shape moral
judgement and the vertebrate invertebrate contradistinction frames invertebrate animals in terms of what they are not.
That is animals like us, animals that have moral standing, that occupy a high position in a scale of natura,
which is an archaic progressive picture of the history of life, which hopefully you can see in the photo here.
And so the worry is that some vertebrate invertebrate distinction,
the distinction rather falsely signals not only biological and ecological significance, but also moral significance.
Whereas biology has long since moved on from this outdated value laden classification, bioethics is still very much encumbered by it,
and these moral connotations have likely shaped the philosophy and policy of invertebrates.
With respect to policy, international animal care news committees are epoxies therefore generally known which govern.
The treatment of animals in science and medicine have been slow to develop guidelines for invertebrate animals.
Major scientific ranking agencies in the US, such as, for example, the NIH only requests information about the proposed use of vertebrate animals.
European Union rules regarding the use of animals in scientific research likewise covers only vertebrates in other states,
with a single exception for simplified models such as octopuses, squid and cuttlefish.
And perhaps most ironically, efforts to replace research animals with more ethically sound alternatives known as the three R's approach that is,
replacement reduction refinement.
Have actually led some researchers to replace vertebrates not with human tissue or computer models, but with invertebrate animals.
And philosophical accounts of animal welfare have done little to challenge this policy dichotomy.
Most accounts are focussed on mammals and most recently, birds, and perhaps on occasion officials, bioethicist, bioethics have.
Most have almost entirely avoided critical engagement with invertebrates and to the extent that invertebrates are discussed at all.
This is largely limited to the instrumental contributions they make to the health and stability of ecosystems.
Plus, there are some signs, meanwhile, have recently begun to explore implications of invertebrate behaviour in neurobiology,
core theories of cognition and consciousness. But when it comes to articulating the ethical implications of this work, they have typically demurred.
One of the only explicit philosophical treatments of the moral standing of invertebrate animals is due to the philosopher of science,
Peter Carruthers. His ethical analysis was not ethical, rather his that his analysis of the science is solid.
I'm going to say that his ethics leaves much to be desired, according to Carruthers.
Some invertebrates, such as honeybees and giant spiders, likely possess a belief, desire or psychology similar to our own.
This, in turn, generates morally significant interests and as a consequence makes them prima facia subjects of moral concern.
However, he argues, we are under know all things considered, obligation to care about their welfare precisely because they are invertebrates.
In other words, their status as invertebrates is adequate grounds for their moral exclusion.
He concludes that the invertebrate case presents a problem for traditional animal ethics,
which must either extend moral consideration to invertebrates which he takes to be absurd or rescind it from non-human animals,
which is his preferred conclusion. So, in effect,
Carruthers seems to suggest that the invertebrate case serves as a kind of reductio
against the leading accounts of moral standing for all non-human animals.
I have a quote here that I can read later. Oh, I'm sorry. The slides don't appear to be don't appear as they ought to.
But I think that extending moral consideration to some invertebrates is intuitively absurd.
And why should this counterintuitive application require that we reject an otherwise coherent and well-worked out theory of moral standing?
Carruthers offers no real sustained defence of these conclusions.
But when a moral theory conflicts with a moral judgement, there's an open question as to which one even modifies our theory of moral
standing rather than our specific judgements about invertebrates in this case.
One context in which we should opt to reject specific moral judgements rather than to discard or modify an established moral theory.
Because when we have reason to think that the specific judgements are vulnerable to distorting influences.
Indeed, there are a number of cognitive biases that are likely to distort ethical intuitions about the moral standing of invertebrates.
And these call into question the basic moral intuitions on which Carruthers,
as he rests, namely that extending world ending to invertebrates is patently absurd.
Now, although, CARRUTHERS This ethical analysis is unpersuasive, and I will have more to say about this later.
If you do, in fact, reflect the attitudes toward invertebrate welfare among the general population, including bioethicists and policymakers,
to many, it is simply self-evident that invertebrates are not the kinds of animals about whom we have to care morally.
But I think that this common intuition may stem from a combination of moral cognitive biases, false empirical beliefs.
And worries about extending extending moral standing to certain invertebrates.
So let's turn to the cognitive biases first.
I suspect that a range of biases may have caudally influenced judgements about the moral standing of invertebrates,
and thus have played a causal role in their exclusion from subject centred moral consideration.
Now it's well known that empathy modulates moral judgement.
That's to say, reciprocity. Individuals tend to morally favour those with whom they contingently empathise over those with whom they do not.
And people tend to empathise with individuals who look more like them, who are judged to be more attractive.
I've Hope Hicks over there, with whom they have a history of reciprocity and whom they consider to be members of the in-group.
By contrast, people tend to have less empathy for those who are less familiar, less subjectively attractive,
or who are who belong to an active group such as a separate race or ethnicity or nationality, song and empathy, or more accurately,
its absence is likely to influence judgements about moral standing,
which helps to explain widespread moral attitudes toward invertebrates invertebrates
who are low on the human empathy attribution scale for a number of reasons.
First, the vast majority of invertebrates are rarely considered attractive, cute or cuddly, like the jumping spider on your right.
And for this reason, their needs tend not to elicit much empathetic concern.
Second, invertebrates, such as arthropods and molluscs,
have almost maximally dissimilar are almost maximally dissimilar from tetrapod vertebrates like ourselves.
Features of invertebrate body plants are radically all like those of vertebrates.
Distinct larval phases are common to invertebrates, but alien to us, as are certain forms of society, like caste based sociality or swarm behaviour.
And indeed,
these characteristics may trigger other cognitive biases that then reinforce moral exclusion and this overall morphological and behavioural alien.
This makes empathy particularly difficult to bridge.
It may be tempting to treat this empathy gap as a legitimate source of moral intuitions or grounding for moral judgements.
As Carruthers and some by conservative ethicists seem to do.
I'm thinking here we are cats. But this will be problematic for several reasons.
First, the human empathetic response evolved to home in on human psychology.
And so it may be a poor guide to understanding non-human animals, either particularly for non mammalian and especially non vertebrate animals.
Human beings have well-known tendencies to favour faces with certain kinds of features large expressive camera type eyes and inviting smile,
symmetrical features and so on, and to find these attractive and disarming.
But humans tend to express negative moral attitudes about subjectively unattractive beings.
Beyond this, humans are highly committed to subtle changes in facial expression,
and our many facial muscles are capable of broadcasting a wide range of beliefs, desires and evolution and emotions.
As a consequence,
we find ourselves used when confronted with an impassive or an expressive face on an animal that evolution did not equipped with such abilities.
Fishers fall into this category, as would insects, to the extent that there are large enough for us humans to see their faces.
Faces that are adorned by large companies that are unlikely to garner the cuteness responses that typically trigger empathy.
When it comes to sparsely haired, slimy, squishy, scurrying, swarming animals,
the empathy gap may run deeper than for merely unattractive animals provoking not apathy, but disgust.
The disgust response in humans probably first evolved to help early humans avoid pathogens and infectious agents.
But there's evidence that it was later co-opted to mediate social interactions.
In particular, disgust appears to modulate moral judgement and even more fundamentally, judgements about moral standing.
Disgust appears to play an important role in driving moral, exclusionary norms and behaviours.
And indeed, nativist and racist propaganda draws explicitly on the disgust response in
portraying immigrants and other races or ethnicities as disease bearing vermin,
or as insects like cockroaches or as parasitic free riders.
Although the science is not yet settled,
it is quite plausible that disgust responses can distort moral judgements and policies as they appear to have done in cases like interracial marriage,
homosexuality, GMOs and so on.
We don't know exactly how disgust features in moral exclusion, but it's highly plausible that disgust has served to reinforce bigoted moral
judgements and institutions and made it harder to subject them to critical scrutiny.
And this is likely to be true for invertebrates as well.
If invertebrates score low in the empathy scale, they earn high marks on the scale of disgust.
Most insects and spiders tend to provoke a really strong disgust response in humans.
So much so that splash and pictures of arthropods are sometimes preceded by a trigger warning.
At least in the US. Crying for disgust has been shown experimentally to to increase the moral disapproval directed at human agents.
And we might expect it to operate similarly, if not more intensely,
when directed in beings like invertebrates that are themselves the direct objects of the disgust.
In addition, many arthropods map genetically altered categories that are associated with parasite.
In other, others are dropped onto categories associated with other physical dangers, although in fact, very few of them, in fact, represent a danger.
And because of this, they often provoke over generalised aggression and avoidance.
This type of response might be an adaptive heuristic for managing evolutionary risk.
But it's not a legitimate basis for scriptural moral standing, and in fact is likely to distort such judgements.
The opposite of the disgust response is what Sherman and Hape called the cuteness response.
Q just promotes the desire for increased social engagement with a cute thing.
Whereas disgust leads to avoidance and disengagement from the discussed proroguing being and disengaging from discuss
provoking things correlates with failing to attribute or else under attributing mental states to those beings.
This, in turn, could subjectively justify moral disengagement.
In contrast, the cuteness response enhances the tendency to infer mental states.
And this, in turn, feeds back into empathetic concern leading to moral inclusion.
Even if empathy and discuss are not polar opposite emotions, they do appear to have opposite effects on moral judgement and inclusion.
Empathy tends to motivate a positive engagement with empathise, whereas discussed tends to result in disengagement.
And so it shouldn't be surprising that I discussed provoking animals like arthropods and
invertebrates will tend to be excluded from any morality that relies on empathetic concern.
Now there are several other cognitive biases that are likely to shape ethical attitude toward invertebrates.
Devices might not be limited to the invertebrate issue. But there's reason to think that they're especially salient in the invertebrate case.
And the first is what we might call a size threshold bias. Consider the lobster.
The less behaviourally and neuro anatomically sophisticated than the jumping spider or bumblebee.
The cluster often appears as an appropriate subject of moral concern.
We feel empathy toward the cluster, but not the spider.
One reason for this might be that we eat lobsters, but not spiders,
which might make us reflect more on our actions regarding the lobster but not the spider.
Still, I think something more appears to drive our intuitions here, and this might be a difference in size.
Animals that fall below a certain size threshold tend to fall off the moral radar, so to speak, and apparently below the threshold of moral standing.
The size threshold bias might be a useful moral heuristic if there were an actual
relationship between size and the characteristics that give rise to moral standing.
For example, if size below a certain threshold were to guarantee the absence of, say,
phenomenal consciousness cognition, then we might have a reason to use size as a proxy for moral standing.
And one might think that size checks moral standing, because small body size indicates small brains.
And tiny brains, it might be thought cannot in principle support cognition or sentience.
But this fact expectation doesn't seem to be borne out by the evidence.
It's all discussed in the moment. And so the size threshold bias is properly characterised as moral bias rather than as a useful moral heuristic.
Another size bias relates not to individuals, but to populations.
And this is the tendency to value individuals less when they're members of a numerous class.
You may not know this, but ants alone account for roughly 20% of the animal biomass on Earth.
So these large numbers may lead to the erroneous judgement that each member of the group is therefore replaceable.
For conservation purposes. The judgement may be correct, but this of course glosses over the subject centred moral value of the animals themselves,
which is obviously unrelated to the size of populations they comprise or how they interact ecologically with other species.
And this is as true of the case of ants as it is with elephants.
The population size bias is related to a distinct from another potential bias, which we might call the D individualisation bias.
And this is the tendency to see some individual insects as parts of a larger individual,
the colony which outlives them, rather than has agents that are eligible for moral concern in their own right.
This leads to another possible source of moral bias the less than threshold bias.
Some invertebrates live very short lives about 1 to 3 years in the case of the common octopus.
A bit less for house raised jumping spider and a fleeting 30 or so days for the summer work for honeybee folk.
Moral intuitions may suggest that animals with so little time left make comparably smaller world claims.
Even if this were so. Moral standing itself cannot depend on the amount of time one has left.
If it did, then moral standing of humans would change as people grew older or when they felt terminally ill.
Nor does lifespan easily track relative moral status.
Many mammals, for instance, live comparatively shorter lives in other vertebrates, such as, for example, crocodiles and tuna.
But this does not affect the higher moral status attributed to them. And of course, trees and giant clams live for many generations.
And at least one jellyfish is immortal. Perhaps instead less than serves as a heuristic this that beings which fall below a certain
less than threshold are unlikely to possess the mental properties around moral standing.
Here's how that argument might go. An adapted strategy for short lived animals might be to develop rigid behavioural
routines rather than cognitive machinery that is needed for learning.
This might be because learning is time intensive and such animals have very little time.
Thus, short lived animals might be unlikely to evolve complex cognitive machinery,
making the lesson by us in fact a useful heuristic for identifying morally relevant characteristics.
Because you might be intuitively plausible, but it also runs afoul of the evidence to which I now turn.
There you go. So we've seen that there are a number of cognitive biases that might distort judgement about invertebrates.
But the most defensible rationale for their moral exclusion is the belief that they lack the properties of
mind that generate psychological interests and which are then thought to be preconditions for moral standing.
But the assumption that tiny brains can't sustain complex thought is problematic for several reasons, and I'll go into that.
First of all, measurements of absolute brain size tell us much less than is often assumed.
The ratio of brain to body size known as the supposed Asian quotient or IQ is more informative because it
indicates that there has been differential evolutionary investment in the metabolically costly brain tissue.
And this, in turn suggests that the fitness payoff must be especially high to sustain these costs.
And the payoff presumably is paid out in cognitive functionality that the increased brain power provides.
But even if IQ is predictive of cognitive ability, then things like things like total neurone number,
modularity, connectivity, metabolic rate, micro structural features and so on are actually more predictive.
And crucially, these features do not scale linearly with size,
which suggests that even tiny brains may possess the absolute raw material for their own form of thought and feeling.
We can see how factor factors like neurone number are more predictive than actually brain size.
If we look at the case of avian brains, birds such as Paris and crows are capable abstract thinkers and problem solvers.
But behavioural events where the cognitive sophistication was long greeted with scepticism.
For two reasons. First, our brains are very small, and second, they lack a structure that physically resembles the mammalian neocortex,
which was long thought necessary for any form of complex cognitive punishment or complex thought or even consciousness.
It's only recently that researchers have come to understand exactly how maybe not exactly the wrong word,
but just how in your brain solved the engineering problem of fitting substantial computational power into a very small package,
which of course is crucial for birds, since flight is metabolically and mechanically costly.
It turns out that bird brains contain a much larger number of densely packed neurones compared with similarly sized mammalian brains.
And these densities are especially high in a region associated with complex cognition, which is the functional equivalent of mammalian neocortex.
Not only are neurones more densely configured, but they're also smaller. And this allows more neurones to fit into a smaller volume.
This gives birds increased pound for pound computational potential beyond the capacity of monkeys,
which have much larger brains, but who aren't subject to the biomechanical constraints of flight.
Like birds, many invertebrates have to deal with significant size constraints.
And these constraints are severe for insects and arachnids. This is due to the nature of the body plants and the laws of physics.
So first of all, they can grow beyond a certain size. Lustig collapsed under the weight of their own exoskeleton.
And second, they have these organs for respiration that are distributed throughout the body.
And because volume increases faster than surface area, this presents yet another scaling constraint.
And these constraints place upper limits on the size, their body of their bodies and therefore of their brains.
And so we might ask. Evolution has found a way to pack a large amount of computational power into the small brains of birds.
Might it have done thing for the absolutely tiny brains of arthropods?
There is, in fact, evidence for such solutions. First neural network model suggests that some forms of cognition may actually be
computationally inexpensive and can be accomplished with only a small number of neurones,
something that can easily be handled by the pint sized brains of insects and spiders.
Such models offer a kind of proof of concept. So as Jeremy Piven in last check to point out,
it's hard to imagine that millions upon millions of generations of evolution would
not have arrived at solutions that were arrived at by models that they run.
And in fact, the brains of many insects, spiders,
cephalopods do appear to possess structural characteristics that might support sophisticated forms of cognition.
For example, insects, spiders and octopuses have central processing regions.
These receive and integrate information from various peripheral systems and insects and spiders.
These are called mushroom bodies and octopuses.
These are called the vertical loaves. And these regions are connected by so-called re-entry pathways.
This permit the ongoing bi directional exchange of signals.
These give animals centralised control over the bodies interactions and in fact smaller
size may actually confer certain advantages that aren't available to larger brains.
For example, smaller breaks tend to have smaller and denser neurones.
We saw how this works with birds, and this means that they also have shorter distances between neurones.
Why is this important? Well, it trims the distance that information has to travel and it reduces conduction delays.
A lot for faster thinking. Now, smaller brains also impose constraints on cognition,
but the point for now is that just like it is with computers, bigger is not necessarily better.
Still brain tissue is extremely metabolically costly.
And so we should expect to see increases.
We should expect increased brain size to bring with it a substantial behavioural and cognitive payoff as well.
And there is now a fair amount of behavioural evidence showing how at least some invertebrates put these brains to good use in the interest of time.
I will move through this a bit quickly, but I'm happy to return to it in Q&A.
So for example. Among insects.
Honeybees appear to be capable of cross motor learning.
So that is they're capable of transferring a role like sameness indicates reward that was learned in a visual context to a different,
say, olfactory contest.
Paper wasps recognise faces of their specifics and this allows them to navigate dynamic social hierarchies that other insects don't face.
Bumblebees engage in social learning and can learn complex and highly non instinctive tasks
like string pulling and actually have a video if anybody is interested in doing that.
During the Q&A of a bumblebee pulling out a reward and ants appear to pass the
mirror self-recognition test which human infants only pass around month 22,
several of park molluscs everyone's favourite invertebrate such as octopuses.
Cuttlefish have excellent spatial navigation abilities.
Octopuses excel at problem solving and they may even use rudimentary tools among arachnids.
The tiny, tiny, tiny spider rapidly and flexibly switches from stopping its prey by crouching behind
a leaf to executing a long detour to an ambush location located just above its prey.
This detouring ability suggests that jumping spiders might be using mental maps.
If so, then they are capable of surprisingly sophisticated, representational thinking.
What's more, the jump in Spider, Portia, Africana and you're on your right over there.
Can distinguish between one, two and many.
So these are numerous any abilities again at the level of human events.
So researchers were initially sceptical that such flexible behaviours could be generated by the tiny brains of insects and spiders,
and thus they operated on the assumption that there must be simpler, non-cognitive causes of this behaviour.
Well. The combined weight of the neuroscientific and behavioural evidence I think suggests
that complex cognition may be much more broadly distributed in the tree of animal life.
And as we will see, some forms of cognition may implicate consciousness, while others may be necessary for forming stable preferences.
If so, then some forms of cognition might implicate morally protectable interests.
But cognitive ability alone may be insufficient for moral standing if there is no subject of experience.
Nothing. It is like to be that system.
Then, even if the organism has psychological interests, in some sense those interests cannot be said to matter to it.
And thus its interests cannot be said to matter. Morally phenomenal consciousness, in other words, seems to be a precondition for moral standing,
for having well-being in any meaningful psychological sense.
So are any invertebrates phenomenally conscious or do they are they just sophisticated biological zombies?
There is, of course, no agreement about just how to define or operationalise consciousness.
On some accounts, consciousness is a continuous.
Faisal property of brains, including invertebrate brain, for example,
to analyse information integration theory of consciousness holds that phenomenon.
Consciousness just is the integration of information. That's it. The more information the integrated system, the more conscious that system is.
If this view is right, then even organisms with very simple nervous systems are conscious,
albeit to minimal degrees, that are of questionable moral import.
Others have argued that there are two fundamental abilities that implicate phenomenal consciousness.
One perceptual and one motivational. And there's evidence that some invertebrates like insects, spiders, might have both.
These are sensory binding, which is the ability to perceive disparate elements of a perceptual scene as a single,
coherent whole and directed attention. That is, the ability to direct one's perceptual focus.
Well, the evidence for these abilities is broad based.
First, it may be computationally cheaper and so more accessible to tiny brains to perceive objects as discrete holes,
rather than to detect many individual features of objects, and then to keep track of their ever changing relationships.
At the neurobiological level.
The same re-entered pathways that allow for information integration may also support sensory binding and directed attention.
And these are also present in insects and psychopaths. Another line of support comes from the evolutionary hypothesis that phenomenal consciousness
emerged as an adaptive response to information processing challenges of active lifestyles.
For example, mobile animals need to transform dynamic multi-sensory inputs into a coherent scene as distinct from the animal's movements.
And they also need to pick out relevant cues from heterogeneous environments.
And thus, on this view, all mobile animals, unlike their distant, sessile cousins, should be expected to have some degree of animal consciousness.
But therefore our consciousness may not be sufficient for moral standing.
As got the Hanan Giuliani. So let's to point out in a joint article because objectivity is probably not
sufficient to generate psychological interests if an organism has moral standing,
that organism must presumably be capable of judging in some very rudimentary sense that this state of affairs are desirable and others undesirable.
And this is where affective states come into the picture. What then, can we say about the effect of worlds of invertebrates?
Again, the scientific study of affect among invertebrates is still fairly new,
but emerging findings suggest that some insects and perhaps spiders have emotion like states,
and that in some invertebrates these emotions are mediated by dopamine, which is the same hormone that regulates emotion in humans.
For example, bumblebees tend to interpret ambiguous stimuli more optimistically after being exposed to a pleasant stimulus,
which is just what humans do when we're happy.
And both fruit flies and bees respond more pessimistically after exposure to an aversive stimulus, something like vigorous shaking.
And again, this is something that humans do when we're sad or stressed.
And just this perceptual binding is a pervasive feature of some arthropods and molluscs.
So too is what we might call semantic binding.
Where in objects are classified in real time into ecologically relevant categories such as predator prey, mate, obstacle and so on.
And appropriate effective balances are attached to these categories.
In other words, the world of these animals is at least in a very rudimentary sense, meaningful.
But of all affective states, what's perhaps most at the centre of moral analysis is pain perception.
Many invertebrates have receptors called Nociceptors, which allow for the rapid detection and response to noxious stimuli.
But pain detection is not conclusive evidence of pain perception.
The leading adaptive explanation is that pain perception facilitates instrumental learning.
And this helps animals to avoid future exposure to noxious animals, not just to run away immediately.
If pain teaches animals, which situations to avoid,
then an animal that is capable of instrumental learning might also be expected to be capable of experiencing pain.
And there is some evidence of instrumental learning among invertebrates, including some molluscs and insects.
Other markers of pain perception include behaviours like grooming of injured body
parts of has been shown to shrink as well as what is known as motivational trade-off.
For example, hermit crabs are apparently willing to withstand a mild electric shock in order to obtain a more desirable shell,
but not a stronger shot or a less desirable shell.
In addition, endogenous opioids which modulate pain perception in humans have also been found in invertebrates.
But on the other hand, some insects appear to engage in normal feeding and mating behaviours, even after sustaining severe injury such as this number.
In the case of the mantis, either these animals don't mind the pain or else they judge it to be a fair price for the encounter.
So it is possible that some invertebrates do not experience pain in the way that vertebrates typically do.
But even if this is the case, they might still have rich, phenomenal and effective worlds,
and this world could plausibly give rise to morally protectable psychological interests.
So we might not want to be so quick as to infer from differential pain, phenomenology and responses that invertebrates are mere zombie automata.
In this way, the case of invertebrate pain perception might process to reconsider traditional approaches to nonhuman animal moral standing.
To the extent that these have typically centred around vertebrate centric understandings of pain and as behavioural parlance.
This elder suggests that some invertebrates may have characteristics that ground moral standing.
But a reliable evidence base requires reliable, inferential strategists.
And drawing reliable inferences about invertebrate cognition is especially challenging given how alien their brains,
their bodies, their lifeways, their evolutionary histories are.
So there's bound to be greater uncertainty about the future of morally relevant cognitive properties among invertebrates.
The science of comparative cognition tends to cope with uncertainty by erring on the side of avoiding false positives that is,
avoiding wrongly ascribing sophisticated cognition to or consciousness, for that matter, to animals.
This may or may not be a good approach,
but this could be a problem if the ethics takes its cues about the existence of morally relevant properties from science.
Because the kind of burden of proof that might be warranted on the side of ethics is different from the burden of proof that's warranted in science.
One way that bioethicists deal or at least might deal with this is by implementing a sort of
precautionary approach or some other approach that airs on the side of winning false negatives.
But there are limits to the plausibility and desirability of precaution as an action guiding heuristic.
And one thing that we might do if we want to develop a scientifically engaging animal ethics is I'm sorry,
one thing that we need to do is to justify and reconcile these competing error of what and strategies.
Finally, let's turn to one last reason for the exclusion of invertebrates.
Earlier, I suggested that the fact that people don't empathise with invertebrates is not sufficient grounds.
To deny the moral standing, as for others wants to do. The idea that there's a tight connection between empathy and moral standing is quite
obviously inconsistent with prevailing subject centre counts of moral standing.
These accounts aren't grounded in our tendency to empathise with individuals of a particular sort or for that matter,
in any other relational property. Instead, these are grounded in the possession of certain morally relevant psychological properties.
Different psychological capabilities might confer different moral statuses or moral standards of different ways,
and these might give rise to more expansive or more truncated sets of rights and or morally protectable interests.
But the point that Carruthers style objections miss is that any plausible account of moral
standing can't be premised on contingent sociological patterns of empathetic concern,
especially when those concerns might be distorted by cognitive biases and false beliefs.
We might contingently sympathise with individuals of different races.
Different ethnicities, different genders, there's different animal taxa.
Or we might not. We might include some individuals in our cooperative groups, or we may not.
But our contingent sympathies, reciprocity, relations, other non subjects that are facts cannot be the source of moral protection.
Okay. But suppose that the scientist said, and that we're confident that some invertebrates do have morally protectable interests.
Now what? Suppose also that this leads us to accept that some invertebrates have moral standing, at least on our best theory of moral standing?
Could we still have defensible reasons for excluding invertebrates for the moral calculus?
Well, one reason for excluding them might be that extending moral standing to invertebrates
could make morality overly demanding and hence ultimately implausible.
There are good reasons to think that moral theories must be minimally psychologically realistic for beings like us, as Owen Flanagan argues.
And the worry is that requiring that the requirements of this new and more inclusive morality would grind life to a relatively halt,
people would be morally accountable for every insight that meets its end on average.
Every spider that failed to rescue from the bathtub, every squashed mosquito,
every population of fleas sacrificed for the comfort of a companion animal,
people would have to effectively sweep the floor before them in smocks so as to avoid stepping on scurrying beetles and ants.
And so to say nothing of biting and driving up worse.
The entire modern agricultural system would be morally suspect.
This is given us no holds barred battle with property, insects, and of course,
biomedical benefits to humans could potentially be foregone if invertebrates are afforded even minimal protections in clinical and basic research.
People would have to either submit to a radical change in lifestyle or to count as their role in the suffering of trillions of things.
The first option would be too difficult in practice.
The second would impose psychological burden that is too heavy, too alienating for personal projects for most people to bear.
And so the extension of moral standing to invertebrates should be rejected.
Or so the argument goes. Well, the first reply.
Is that extending basic protections to invertebrates in the research context,
which is the primary focus of this talk, is unlikely to require a dramatic overhaul of common practices.
Especially because the framework for this is already in place for vertebrates.
Subsuming invertebrates into this framework is unlikely to significantly impede or increase the cost of research.
And it's important that we don't lose focus here. For example,
we can't talk about constraints on our treatment of vertebrates in scientific research without resolving other moral
questions like how we should deal with rodent incursions in our home or deer that went right to the highway and so on.
Well, so too, we can keep the focus on the ethical treatment of invertebrates in experimental settings without settling all the other moral questions.
Still, one may worry that extending invertebrates more regard, even in this limited,
safe sense, could have ramifications well beyond the experimental context.
But there are two reasons to think that the overindebtedness concern in this case may be misplaced.
First,
I think we should be careful not to assume that even significant inconveniences of abiding by moral theory should count against that moral theory.
After all, moral progress in the form of inclusion has often inconvenienced those who have had to cede some real
or perceived advantage in order to make room for the flourishing of previously marginalised others.
As Buchanan and Russell Powell argue in the forthcoming book Seconds and in this case, more importantly,
it's just not obvious that moral consideration of invertebrates would in fact lead to impossible to discharge moral obligations,
or that it would lead to repugnant moral conclusions. For several reasons.
First. While invertebrates vastly outnumber vertebrates, the number of invertebrate species with moral standing may turn out to be very small.
Second, the fact that an invertebrate animal has moral standing does not entitle that individual to equal treatment or confer equal moral status.
How weighty the interests are,
how we should balance them against competing moral claims depends on unresolved questions about how to reconcile moral interests,
conflicts and and aggregation issues among beings with different moral stances.
And these problems are not, of course, unique to invertebrate ethics.
But the point, I think, is that the de minimis problem should be diffused through the resolution of interest conflicts and not by discarding
our best accounts of moral standing or by arbitrarily excluding these alien beings from our moral community.
Thank you.