Sentience is Sufficient for Basic Rights Protection

Introduction

The work I draw on to argue this topic is Gary L. Francione's, primarily his book, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?, but you can also read more at his blog, The Abolitionist Approach, which is linked as 'evidence' below. Professor Francione's approach to animal rights holds that the only characteristic necessary for basic rights consideration is sentience.

What is Sentience?

To be sentient is to be conscious or self-aware, capable of perception or feeling. Sentient beings feel sensations of pain, pleasure and so on. When a being is sentient, s/he will naturally have interests. For instance, the capacity for sentient beings to feel pain provides them with an interest in not feeling pain.

The Relevance of Sentience to Rights

As discussed in my first argument, What Are Rights?, rights protect interests. Recognizing the interests of sentient beings, we generally consider it unacceptable to inflict pain on one unless there is an extraordinarily good reason. Take the example of a boy who microwaved a cat simply to satisfy his curiosity. I think it's safe to assume most of us would find the boy's behavior objectionable.

Various reasons may be offered for our objections, from our concern that the boy has psychological problems (and that these problems could lead to him harm humans some day) to our concern that the cat have might belonged to a human with an emotional attachment to her. But these are not the fundamental reasons we find the boy's behavior morally objectionable. It's fundamentally objectionable because we recognize that the boy has caused the cat unnecessary harm.

If the cat was not sentient, then she wouldn't have an interest in not being killed or caused pain (because non-sentient beings are unable to sense pain), and so there would be no harm done. Sure, the boy would be responsible for damaging another person's property, and might well be held accountable for replacing that property or providing compensation, but such property destruction would not be considered animal cruelty (much less a moral rights violation). Of course, we know that cats are sentient, and we agree that there is no justification for harming the cat out of morbid curiosity.

Now, if we were to agree that causing pain to a sentient being  was somehow necessary, we might be distressed by what is done to him, but we probably would not object on moral grounds. For example, if a rabid dog attacks the same boy, we might say that he is justified in killing the dog to protect himself from rabies. We generally consider it acceptable if a lethal aggressor is killed in self defense. However, it cannot be reasonably held that the boy needs to microwave an animal merely to satisfy his curiosity.

This example illustrates how, as long as a being is sentient, we recognize--as a moral matter--that the being has an interest in not being harmed, which cannot be ignored or overridden unless it is truly necessary to do so, and thus such a being has the moral right not to be harmed. No other characteristics beyond sentience are necessary to merit moral consideration.