Dissertation abstract: In my PhD thesis, I aim to develop a new philosophical theory in the field of animal ethics that encompasses the multiple philosophical and scientific discoveries made in recent decades regarding animal mind, animal cognition and comparative psychology. Questions and aspects related to the mind have been a central theme in the analytic philosophical tradition. Particularly, the study has focused on understanding the human mind elucidating answers in relation to human consciousness, but there has also been a concern with nonhuman animals in general, especially in recent years. However, despite this current concern and interest in studying the animal mind, no philosophical proposal has developed an ethical theory that contains these new scientific discoveries and advances that have been made in the philosophy of mind. Based on this fact and detecting the existing literature gap, I aim to reconceptualize and update Tom Regan's proposal of being a "subject-of-a-life" (Regan 2004, p. 243), taking into consideration and including the various advances and discoveries made in multiple scientific and philosophical fields. The distribution of the project's research and development tasks will be divided into three main chapters. In the first chapter, based on empirical evidence, I will develop a multidimensional framework that reflects the complex psychological characteristics that emerge in the heterogeneity of animal minds that exist. In doing so, I aim to argue and justify the need to avoid a sentiocentrism approach, where the most relevant characteristic is sentience. This raises the question of which psychological characteristics are relevant and whether all of them must be fundamental or whether some can be derived and depend on the existence of others. In the second chapter, once I have constructed my new multidimensional scientific proposal on the study of animal mental characteristics, I will articulate the development of a new theory on animal ethics that takes into account the multiple psychological features of different animal species. To do this, I argue that the normative framework offered by Tom Regan's initial proposal is an ideal starting point, but it is still a minimal theory. In the third chapter, I will analyse the implications of the development of this new ethical theory based on the heterogeneity and
multidimensionality of different animal species in social, cultural, and political contexts. The research question I will attempt to answer throughout my research will be: What are the relevant animal mental and cognitive capacities for a non-sentiocentrism ethics? To conclude, I maintain that shifting the focus from seeing the mind as a dichotomous, all-or-nothing feature to a cluster of features that accepts gradation will allow me to argue for a non-sentientism theory, as there would be only a network of overlapping and intersecting similarities, and not a central feature from which ethics is based (Andrews et al., 2018, p. 79)
