id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
en-wikipedia-org-409		Ethics of uncertain sentience - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	2977	495	53	David Foster Wallace in his 2005 essay "Consider the Lobster" investigated the potential sentience and capacity of crustaceans to experience pain and the resulting ethical implications of eating them.[1][2] In 2014, the philosopher Robert C. Jones explored the ethical question that Wallace raised, arguing that "[e]ven if one remains skeptical of crustacean sentience, when it comes to issues of welfare it would be most prudent to employ the precautionary principle regarding our treatment of these animals, erring on the side of caution".[3] Maximilian Padden Elder takes a similar view regarding the capacity for fishes to feel pain, arguing that the "precautionary principle is the moral ethic one ought to adopt in the face of uncertainty".[4] Simon Knutsson and Christian Munthe argue that from the perspective of virtue ethics, that when it comes to animals of uncertain sentience, such as "fish, invertebrates such as crustaceans, snails and insects", that it is a "requirement of a morally decent (or virtuous) person that she at least pays attention to and is cautious regarding the possibly morally relevant aspects of such animals".[8]	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-409.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-409.txt