Sentientism

[2] Sentientists consider that arbitrarily giving different moral weight to sentient beings based solely on their species membership is a form of unjustified discrimination known as speciesism.

[7] In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham made a comparison between slavery and sadism toward humans and non-human animals:The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor [see Louis XIV's Code Noir] ... What else is it that should trace the insuperable line?

But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old.

but, Can they suffer?The late 19th- and early 20th-century American philosopher J. Howard Moore, in Better-World Philosophy (1899), described every sentient being as existing in a constant state of struggle.

Moore believed that only sentient beings can make such moral judgements because they are the only parts of the universe which can experience pleasure and suffering.

[8]: 144 Other prominent philosophers discussing or defending sentientism include Joel Feinberg,[4] Peter Singer,[9][1] Tom Regan,[10] and Mary Anne Warren.

This is why the limit of sentience (...) is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others.Utilitarian philosophers such as Singer care about the well-being of sentient non-human animals as well as humans.

[2] John Rodman criticized the sentientist approach, commenting "the rest of nature is left in a state of thinghood, having no intrinsic worth, acquiring instrumental value only as resources for the well-being of an elite of sentient beings".

[4] Philosopher Gregory Bassham has written that "many environmentalists today reject sentientism and claim instead that all living things, both plants and animals, have moral standing".