We are a social science think tank researching long-term social and technological change, particularly moral circle expansion. We make our research results public and free, so anyone can use them to make more impactful decisions with their advocacy, careers, donations, and other resources.

We are founded on the principle of effective altruism, meaning we strive to help others as much as possible using the best evidence available. We envision a society in which the interests of all sentient beings are fully considered, regardless of their sex, race, species, substrate, location, or any other characteristic apart from their sentience. We see this expansion as an important means to prevent suffering now and in the far future.

Our mission is to conduct interdisciplinary research on moral circle expansion and to share that research with individuals and institutions making the world a better place. Two particularly important areas of expansion are farmed animals and artificial sentience.

Sentience Institute

Outreach and research in defense of animals.

Animal Ethics provides information and promote debate about issues in animal ethics, sentience, animal interests and speciesism.

Detailed information on the data regarding the situation of nonhuman animals as well as on the arguments to defend animals is not always available, and we intend to provide it to all those who want to help them. In addition, we do outreach work ourselves aimed not at stopping particular ways in which animals are harmed (which other organizations are already addressing), but at achieving a shift in attitudes towards speciesism.

Our work deals with the way nonhuman animals are considered in everyday life, as well as how they are considered in fields that affect human attitudes and activities that are relevant to animals. These include academia, scientific fields, and the law. We look at the way nonhuman animals are impacted by current human activities, and how they might be impacted by future planned or unplanned human activities. This involves not only the ways we might harm them, but also how we might help them even when the cause of their plight is not human action.

The field of animal ethics deals with why we should take nonhuman animals into consideration in our moral decisions, and the ways in which we should. This has tremendously relevant practical consequences. Many people currently have little regard for nonhuman animals. But more often, people do give some consideration to the interests of animals, but still have a discriminatory attitude towards them. We can morally consider someone but still discriminate against them in a way that harms them. We can also discriminate against them in ways that don’t harm them at all, such as by helping some individuals more than we help others, for reasons that are unfair. Animal ethics as a field addresses these questions, and it is our aim to deal with them.

Animal Ethics

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Not caring about certain sentient beings can be (and has been) catastrophic, so increasing the chance of not leaving anyone and their suffering unattended is of the utmost importance. Sentience Institute's research is very useful in this regard!
