• squaresinger@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Sentience is roughly defined as “Line in the sand between humans and things we are allowed to eat”.

    It’s a concept created to justify treating animals differently than humans in a world where the old justification (“You can eat animals because God said so”) isn’t applicable anymore.

    Since the concept is defined backwards to justify preexisting actions, it doesn’t have any actually solid definition, and whether something’s sentient or not depends pretty much entirely on the opinion of the person deciding it.