Metaethical Concerns

What obliges one to participate in an ethical system?

I've had quite a number of conversations about ethics on campus and there seems to be about three popular reasons why one should act morally. By far the most often heard is because one doesn't want to get into trouble, which is no ethical reason at all. Another I heard once or twice was when discussing why one wouldn't trust a person who didn't believe in God: a person who doesn't believe wouldn't have any reason to act morally  That one is the most scary because it implies that that believer is only acting morally for fear of punishment by God, not because they want to act morally.

Only occasionally do people appeal to a humanist ethical system. I can't help but feel that there is a grain of truth to the theists supposition that it is hard for those not coerced by a god-figure to act morally. Maybe also some of the blame lies in alienating justice from morality, as if it could be a separate entity.

I want to figure out how to diffuse this disconnect in a way that everyone can see and understand. If morality is fundamentally constructed off the starting point of the necessity of satisfying basic human needs then morality is fundamental to the DNA of human sharing and reciprocity. Since we are fundamentally social creatures it is impossible to ignore morality as it is the fundamental understanding informing all our actions.

Having a SOAL is Important

The subject of a life (SOAL) criteria is vital for any humanist or post-absolutist system of natural rights above and beyond the issue of animal rights. Our nation's founding documents list our rights as natural and 'God given,' but what happens when there is no God? There is no such thing as a morality derived from nature, or else you could argue that homosexuality was immoral because it makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective (also false). How then do we talk of 'rights,' insinuating duties to individuals above and beyond arbitrarily ascribed law, when there seems to be no absolute basis to put rights on?

That's where the SOAL criteria comes in. While it is true that the universe is fundamentally meaningless and valueless we still tend to seek meaning and value things. The key is that value is not external or intrinsic to the metaphysical objects of the world around the conscious subject, but rather it is the capacity in the subject's mind to value that creates value! A conscious being with the ability to value likely values itself and objects related to it. Moral value is thus constructed, but it is absolutely constructed (1) in that a subject values itself and certain metaphysical objects around it, so therefore the subject itself has inherent moral value created a priori from being a thing that values.

Talk of rights should then be fundamentally informed by the SOAL criteria, which provide the epistemological mechanism for deciding if a being possesses natural rights. Relying on a document as the basis for rights is dangerous and fundamentally fallacious because that document needs to refer elsewhere to guarantee rights. It would be fantastic if the popular concept of rights considered them as something naturally beyond the reach of government or societal regulation.

(1) That is, not haphazardly constructed in any way the conscious mind wants like some would argue.

My Course Take Away

Animals and Ethics has served to strengthen my resolve on issues relating to animal rights and clarified a key issue I was still on the fence about. Animal testing seems to be in the category of ill-gotten gains, those sort of gains you cannot ever resort to because they are fundamentally morally wrong. Thus, like it is wrong for doctors to experient on a human without their consent for no other reason than humans are enSOALed beings with a right to not be killed and tortured against their will, animals have a similar right because they are similarly enSOALed.

Moving into the future I plan on becoming fully vegan, following my younger brother who at 16 has been vegan for almost two years proving it's not as hard as I used to assume. Aramark is terrible though  and I hope to get off the meal plan next year so I can design my own more healthy and balanced diet for the next year.

I really hope everyone has come to a similar realisation that the case for animal rights is pressing and requires action.

Changing Attitudes on Animal Rights

In response to Sebastian's post here

While this is not a strictly philosophical post, it is fascinating to reflect on the history of various social movements that have achieved (to some degree) success nationally and internationally. Some movements that have succeeded are the international movement's for women's rights, to abolish slavery, and now gay rights may have moved into the category of successful movements. On not one of these issues has there been a perfect victory(1), but at the very least the legitimate powers-that-be recognise the issue and at least make lip service to fighting against these various transgressions against certain groups natural rights.

The victory for animal rights, if it comes, will be far more complete and satisfying than any of these other victories, except perhaps that victory over legal slavery, because of the shear scope and horror of animal suffering under our current system of systematic murder and torture. Naturally this movement is different because it is inherently a liberal movement not a radical one, despite political radicals often being the first to support animal rights. It's a fundamentally liberal movement because animals cannot rise up and advocate for themselves, thus the movement falls into the liberal model of the socially and economically included advocating for the expansion of legal rights to those groups that were previously excluded.

Hopefully the day will come where 'speciesist' is as much an insult as 'homophobe' or 'racist,' but animal rights being accepted by society is by no means inevitable  Our species seems to have an uncanny ability to rationalise, and despite the economic conditions being right, we have been owning and eating animals for millennia. It's going to be a hard habit to break, but we must try, if only in our own lives.

(1) Even slavery still needs work http://www.state.gov/j/tip/what/

Wild v Domestic Animals

In response to Brandon - full post here

I think it is perhaps pressing to discern which animals should be marked as under guardianship and those who take care of themselves. It seems that those animals that are domesticated are the ones most in need of paternalistic guidance as they navigate the complicated social realities of living as part of human society.

What I'm worried about is weather this takes away some essential dignity, not to say that we can say pets have a sense of dignity. These are rights bearing animals with consciousnesses and memories so they certainly require being treated with some respect.

I'm not sure if wild animals count as those under guardianship. Our relationship with animals in the wild is much less straightforward than our relationship with our domesticated animals, especially considering our various and sundry failures to positively intervene in the affairs of the larger ecosystem. If anything we have a responsibility to wild animals, but we are not their guardians because they don't need us. They simply need us not to interfere in their natural habitats so they can get on with their lives.'

In short, it seems we have positive duties to those animals we are guardians of (i.e. providing shelter and guidance in human society) and only negative duties to wild animals (i.e. to not utterly destroy their environment or otherwise unreasonably intervene in their lives).

Q&A Ten Question Two

Q: What is it about subjecthood that makes it immoral to own [a subject]?

A: I said in my Q&A that it is immoral to own a being that was a subject of a life (SOALs) because it is immoral to interfere with a SOALs interests. That's sort of hard to defend because we need to figure out what is in an animal's interest. Do most animals have anything more than immediate interests? Does this mean that we can't ever constrain an animal because that animal would presumably always be interested in escaping from those constraints?

There is a difference between conscious interests and psychological and physical interests. The conscious interests of animals aim at satisfying those psychological and physical interests which the conscious mind of the animal might not be equipped to properly provide for, especially if the animal is a member of human society. Thus it is not morally wrong to stop a pig consciously in pursuit of food from walking over a cliff because it's conscious mind is not able to attend to the pigs fundamental interests. Similarly, restraining a dog in the appropriate social situations may be necessary because it relies on it's participation in human society for it's psychological and physiological needs.

Q&A Ten Question One

Q: Is ownership an appropriate model for human relationships to objects?

A: Ownership does not appear to be an appropriate model for human interaction with animals and has related practical, if not moral, pitfalls. As I argued for before, animals cannot be owned as Subjects of a Life, which is the moral difference between them and objects. An object can only have instrumental moral value since the object is not a valuer in itself and thus, if it is to have any moral value at all, that value must be derived from it's instrumental value to a SOAL.

Then the only reason that a the property relationship would be morally inappropriate is if it causes harm to SOALs. We can clearly point out cases where property ownership causes harm to humans, such as the ownership of the means of production by a capitalist class. There is the technical skill and material wealth available to eliminate extreme poverty, but because of ownership there are vast amounts of humans and nonhumans harmed by the mechanisms of an irrational capitalism.

This doesn't invalidate little Johnny's ownership of his teddy bear, and it doesn't give us a clear picture of a post-ownership relationship with objects, but it does point out that the property relationship is in often a morally inappropriate way for a society to structure it's material culture in regards to the creation and distribution of wealth.

'Property' Under the Law

I am convinced of the need to abolish human utilization of animals in the economic sphere. I don't think that animals need to be removed from the human social sphere altogether, but accorded the basic rights they deserve in their interaction with moral-agent humans. Animals are not capable of entering into a contract and therefore any utilization of them in an economic setting is forced labor. Naturally using their very flesh is a violation of their most basic rights.

The tactics of the animal right's movement varies, but Regan is right in pointing out that physical violence against humans is solidly off the table for almost all activists. Civil disobedience is widely supported, especially due to the enormity of animal suffering and the peripheral nature of the movement. Between violence against humans and civil disobedience  an we justify the use of violence against property itself?

In a certain sense, property is an extension of an individual, in a similar way that a persons pinky belongs to them their land belongs to them. 

To limit this discussion to a specific type of case, assume a laboratory owns a dog that will be vivisected and thereby killed in a most brutal way. Assuming a custodian had access to that dog and could 'steal' it without causing any property damage, the law would take this as a type of violence but animal rights ethics could not. It seems that the same logic of civil disobedience applies, while acknowledging the right of the state to enforce existing laws, breaking such a law would not be moraly reprehensible because owning an animal is impossible due to it's nature as a right's bearing being thus nothing was being stolen.

Do non-state actors ever have a valid role to play in protecting rights (especially when the state refuses to do so)?

Faith in Animal Rights

Jamison et al bring up an excellent critique of the structure of the animal rights movement when they make the case that the movement can be a functional secular religion. This critique, while useful in considering the structure of the movement, is a prime example why sociological thought is different from philosophical thought. Like a lot of pieces in it's field the reader can't help but notice the author assumes they are writing from a stance of ideological neutrality (the social 'sciences' rhetorically justifying their existence) and thus can properly talk about deviation from this ideologically neutral world.

So much nonsense. There is certainly a desire for transcendental feeling in human beings, which is expressed by religion and various secular ideologies, but throughout the authors seek to rhetorically invalidate these religions and ideologies without dealing with those religion/ideologies contents. Very much like how early anthropologists catalogued the various practices of foreign cultures without bothering to ask the members what any of it meant from their perspective, let alone considering they may have valid and pertinent views.

That all being said, it did make me think about how the move from believing that suffering was bad, and then acting on that by becoming a vegetarian/vegan is something of a mystic process  a transcendental movement that may lack essential logical justification. The average person on the street would say something is good or bad for arbitrary reasons, whereas the non-relativist philosopher must justify that there is an objective way to determine if an action or thing is good or bad.

Do We Need a Law?

In response to Sebastian's 'Companion Animals and the Law?'

I totally agree that we need to change the way we as a culture interact with our domestic animals. It is morally improper to 'own' an animal, and that concept of ownership of animals needs to change legally and culturally.

I wonder if regulation is the wrong approach. Certainly the state should play an active role in convincing people to change their opinions on nonhuman animals, but could we bring about the changes needed in our interaction with nonhuman animals without regulation. 

The world isn't perfect, and some cases will fall through the cracks, but it seems to me that the largest issue confronting domestic animal's rights is our refusal to acknowledge their rights. Societies acknowledgement of animals rights needs to be our first priority

Animal Humiliation

In response to Patrick Kelly's post found here.

The question of animal humiliation is an interesting one. At least in the case of humans it seems that humiliation is some sort of mechanism for social cohesion. Humiliation functions to stop a certain norm or taboo from being disregarded, because the very real pain of humiliation would result as a consequence. Probably one the the reasons the taboo on nudity in our society has been maintained is because of the potential for humiliation.

A pervasive assumption is that animals have no dignity and therefore cannot be shamed or humiliated.  This makes some degree of sense considering many animals are not social creatures like humans and thus had no need to evolve a mechanism of shame. I don't think this is true though.

Consider that a cat, unlike a dog, will not learn tricks because it doesn't see treats as a reward great enough for it's effort. Maybe this betrays a sense of dignity being weighed against reward. Also it may be hard for us to detect dignity in other animals because so many of the behaviors we associate with it are cultural or species specific.

Of course I'm just conjecturing, but if animals do have a sense of dignity being impinged upon by their display at zoos and aquariums we can chalk up another negative in the whole affair.

A Right to Liberty?

Some animal rights theorists contend that animals have a basic right to liberty that is being abridged by their confinement in zoos and aquariums. If we accept that the basic right afforded to animals in possession of rights is that they have the right to pursue their own interests without human interference, it seems like the animal rights advocates have it right.

On the other hand there are many animals who's interests are in staying in a confined environment. Reptiles seem to have better lives confined in a zoo than in the wild. Of course the reptile in question cannot make this judgement for themselves. If an animal cannot even conceptualize freedom how do we know if it would want it?

The easiest solution (or stop gap measure), because we cannot ask the nonhuman in question, is to see what is in their welfare. If a polar bear will go insane in a small enclosure at a zoo, it is not moral to keep that bear enclosed, unless it has no means of life in any other environment. Similarly, if a snake does better in an enclosure and will not suffer any trauma, it seems to be fine to keep it enclosed.

We must be very careful to approach this individual by individual nonhuman animal. One of the follies of our current conceptualization of animals is our tenancy to grant overriding value to their species. We would not ever treat an individual human's moral value as subordinate to the instrumental value of such an abstract concept, and it does disservice to all the rights-bearing individual non-human animals existent to not treat them as full individuals.

Useful Distinctions

In response to M. Gaudet - original post here

As much as I feel that the human/nonhuman animal semantic distinction assumes a very high level of separation, the difference is not so microscopic, especially relative to the average scope of human life and discourse, that we can practically ditch our use of these terms. I understand that no one is seriously advocating eliminating these distinctions in language, but that seems to be the only linguistic solution in sight for eliminating the largely nonexistent difference between humans and other animals. We could also attempt to invent and popularize alternative terms describing humans as a category of animal but largely not a distinct category.

I wonder if a deeper issue may be that humans are evolved to view other animals as hugely different from our own species. Such a psychic distance would give us the advantage of more efficiently exploiting non-humans for our gain.

Without such a radical change in language, we can only fight the latent idea of difference in the words 'human' and 'animal' by stimulating the natural human capacity for empathy that allows us to view other beings as morally relevant conscious others.

Response to Andrew

(the original post can be found here: http://www.aaaandreww.blogspot.com/)

I find the issue of how to deal with labels fascinating. The very fact that there is a semantic separation for a lab animal versus being just an animal signifies and reinforces a deeper conceptual segregation. I also think that labels for race and sexuality fundamentally reinforce a conceptual parsing up of human and animal kind into groups with no inherently greater or lesser moral value.

On the other hand I'm not sure if we can critique divisive terminology because it's so useful. We impose categories on the world to make it possible for us to understand and communicate about the world. The only thing we can do about the moral circumvention often employed by humans to get around their inconsistent actions is not to get rid of conceptual categories but to try to be less inconsistent in our action.

Q&A Six Question Two

Q: Where is hard line between moral preference to those with proximity to us and a universal morality?

A: My initial attraction to the study of morality was the promise of a universal ethics that would categorize actions into positive or negative and also determine what actions should morally be taken. The very plausibility of a scientifically rational and universalizable ethics is very much up for debate but if it wasn't to some degree considered a possibility then there would be no need for a discussion about ethics.

It would seem that while we have a duty not to kill others in order to further ones own interests, and yet this case seems to have a logical foil, which is self defense. In the self defense scenario it seems like you are allowed to defend yourself against an attacker, but this seems to directly violate the first principle of not harming another for one's own interests. So then we can amend the first principle to say that we can never harm others for our own interests unless those interests are very great?

That does not seem practical because it leave a huge grey zone regarding defining what a 'great interest' is. Could 'great interest' be a large sum of money?

Q&A Six Question One

Q: Why is self defense justified?

A: The question of consuming animals for the purposes of life saving experimentation is closely akin to the justification for self defense. If you have an attacker that will kill you that will not stop unless you kill them then it seems you are free to defend yourself.

For animal experimentation it is as if to stop the attacker you must kill a number of innocent bystanders. Also if we assume incrementalism, giving the rights of non-humans less value than humans, we further complicate our calculations. If we do not consider incrementalism as a reality then it would be equally permissible to use humans for experimentation.

I keep wondering why it is permissible to experiment on animals, if the need is great enough, but it seems never to be permissible to experiment on humans against their wishes even when a great multitude can be saved if this happens. Maybe humans consent is more important due to their higher cognitive capacities, but I'm inclined to think this feeling is also informed to some extent by a speciesist bias.

In the end the extremely confusing and hard to calculate complications that come up when justifying the use of animals for experimentation inclines me to be against it.

Philip Wollen

This is an extract from the intelligence squared debate 'Should Meat Be Off the Menu?' Philip Wollen's emotionally charged argument touches on the basic case for animal rights. Though animals may not have the cognitive capacity of humans, and even if we can rightly accord them lower beings because of this, they have the same essential capacity to suffer that makes them morally relevant. It is a simple moral law that those with the capacity to suffer must be included in the moral sphere, it is wrong to think not that if we can make agreements with a being or that some circumstance of birth puts us in a position of power over them that this amounts to a moral privilege to dispense with them as we may. There was once a time where it was universally moral for those 'better' humans to be accorded the power and moral right to power over other humans as we assume for ourselves the right to power over non-human animals. It is an arrangement repugnant to every egalitarian ideal, and it's a gross oversight by a humanity that is struggling to move beyond a dark past of human slavery.

It is our capacity for empathy that is our most unique human capacity, if we fail to exercise it we also fail to be more than any other animal.

Q&A Five Question Two

Q: Is a vegan diet obligatory even if the animals producing non-flesh products are kept in the best possible conditions? [For example if you keep chickens in your back yard in a luxurious coop, with tons of forage, and plentiful feed, and collect their eggs]

A: The majority of laying hens in the US live and die in cramped, crowded, and dirty conditions, often killing each other, going insane, and dying within months of their birth. This is an artificial scenario imposed by the brutal logic of the capitalist market, and I think it is clearly an immoral situation.

Under the best of scenarios it would seem like collecting the products of animals such as a hen would not be immoral. This does not address the situation of the vast majority of animals in industrialized countries however.

Q&A Five Question One

Q: Where is the hard line of trivial desire versus vital need when interfering with the lives of animals?

A: I am sure that eating animals is a trivial desire that does not amount to a vital need to interfere in the lives of animals and do the wrong of ending their lives. I feel confident in this belief because eating animals is not necessary for nutrition, and the excessive resources needed to produce meat makes it an exorbitant luxury. That being said it is hard to put down the hard and fast line where it is OK to end the lives of animals when it corresponds to a great need on the part of a more highly sentient being (such as a human).

We can see that most people would agree that if you could choose between taking a humans life and a dogs life it is more moral to take the dogs life in order to save the human. This shows there are situations where human's value, being greater than that of an animal, entitles them to preferential treatment, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any day-to-day situations where humans morally take precedence over animals. Any ideas for the sort of situation you would commonly observe wherein a humans higher moral status should result in a quantifiable difference in treatment (not differences resulting from being a certain species or whatnot)?

From Whence 'Harm'?

Response to Avery's "What is Harm?"

It's very interesting to investigate what is harm, and some of our semantic confusion over what constitutes harm may come from the epistemological difficulties relating to differentiating between objects and subjects. There is certainly direct harm, something negative happening to a subject, such as a punch in the face of a human. Also we can agree there is indirect harm caused by decreasing the instrumental value of an object, such as when damage is cause to a Monet or a child's teddy bear is trampled. With these definitions of harm it doesn't seem we can really 'harm' a non-subject. 

There do seem to be some interesting hold outs. First, it seems reasonable to take Kant to heart; while we now avoid kicking dogs as we are aware of their intelligence, we might want to avoid getting in the habit of kicking computers so we don't get into the habit of kicking humans (or dogs) as well. Second, unlike computers, which exist because we bade them into existence for our service, plants have an existence separate from humans. Though I firmly believe that moral rights arise from the capacity to value, I intuitively feel that if one cuts down a tree not valued by sentient life there is still harm done to that tree and the other non-sentient organisms dependent on it. This may be a baseless intuition, perhaps a bootless inquisition.

Q&A Four Question One

Q: Is a human more relevant in a lifeboat scenario with Coco the gorilla? Are we so close we are equal even in this situation?

I'm honestly unsure about this one. A gorilla certainly has the right to life and to be left alone. A higher valuation could be based on the animal's higher cognitive capacities. If these capacities are equivalent to mentally stunted humans, then is their moral value equal to that of a human? And further, is a mentally stunted human less morally valuable than a fully developed adult human?

Exploring the Semantics of a 'Person'

The term 'person' is used to denote an entity with the power to engage in contracts with other persons as well as possessing rights and being subject to law. We have discovered already in this course that the conflation of having rights and having the capacity to enter into a contract are not incompatible. All this talk of persons, which brings these two separate things together, seems to me to confuse the discussion. Person is often used synonymously with 'people,' and that term has the same issues. 

If I were the divine lexographer, that demigod who defines words, I would stipulate 'person' as meaning those two things (rights and contracts) and 'people' to mean those who have rights and less than human faculties. In any case, as the term stands now (before reading the chapter) I would say that even the highest functioning primates and whales are not strictly speaking 'persons.'

Maybe there capacity to form contracts with other members of their own species would change my opinion. In that case it would be our fault we couldn't communicate with them.

The Moral Efficacy of Lies

The video above has personally helped motivate me to adopt vegetarianism, my brother veganism  and several of his friends vegetarianism and veganism. My problem is that it does not approach the issue philosophically  and I counted many an outright lie. Is this moral to do whatever it takes to stop people from harming animals? Where is the line?

[One scenario I think of, which is used to justify some amount of lying  supposes you're house is invaded by several gun men. They're there to kill everyone in the house and they ask you 'Is there anyone else here?' Usually this scenario supposes your family is there, but suppose it was a herd of cattle in the basement they would not find otherwise, would you say there where? No you'd be justified in lying to them to preserve the lives of the cattle in the basement. (If they offered to spare your life in exchange it might be a different story, but supposing that's not the case)]

More Thoughts on Vegetarianism

I do understand that this Animals and Ethics class is not 'Vegetarian Boosterism Class' but that's where most of my ideas are springing from. That being said the forefront of the animal and environmental rights movement is precisely the place where we interact with animals the most often; our diets.

I've been thinking a lot on the motivations for vegetarianism and I'm trying to discover what the basis might be for making that basic dietary switch. First, it aligns closely, but not precisely, with the great civil rights movements of the last century that have changed European/American cultures over the last half century or so. All these movements where not radical movements for the overthrow of bourgeois society  but rather movements to expand the civil protections granted to the liberal middle class to excluded segments of society. In this case it is not productive members of societal being officially oppressed into social stagnation, but rather a group fundamentally in equal by almost anyone's standards. We still want to extend rights because we argue the basis of rights is the capacity to suffer and cognise in itself, not the capacity to be a productive member of society, which is assigned arbitrarily by circumstances of birth and social condition.

The animal rights movement has the capability to produce the next great breakthrough for the fundamental human capacity for sympathy and justness. Despite deeply held doubts I can only hope that our age of reason will produce an end to arbitrary suffering caused by a lack of human empathy. If it succeeds, the animal rights movement is fundamentally a triumph for what is the greatest good possible for all humans.

Implicit Content of the Vegetarian Action

Vegetarianism is a moral choice fundamentally based on the decision not to eat the meat so an animal so it does not suffer. But why then does a vegetarian refuse to eat meat even when they played no direct part in the chain leading to the death of the animal for consumption? If a vegetarian was invited to a party and there was meat around why would they let it go to waste?

The first answer may be that that veggie is still participating in the chain that led to the death of an animal only in a slightly more distant way. Another possible reason that eliminates issue with this tenuous connection is that the act of refusing meat is a social signal the content of which makes it clear that eating meat is not pure.

In a world that meat eaters out number vegetarians maybe thirty to one (Wikipedia says so anyway) the vegetarian convinced of the moral efficacy of not eating meat is likely also convinced that others should follow suit. If there really was no possibility of significantly disrupting the meat industry vegetarians would not become so for moral reasons. The ideological content of not eating meat in these marginal cases where no direct material aid was lended to slaughter is emotive rather than moral, the slaughter of nonhuman animals for consumption is so dire that the veggie will refuse even in this case.

Response to 'Initial Thoughts'

(original post here)

I also think that the criteria for being subject of a life need to be considered further  If the reason that animals have rights is because they are able to value themselves to some degree or another, then the capacities that give them the ability to value themselves must be given precedence over the ability to value in a more general way.

Thus the ability to remember one's life is important because it contributes to one being able to value one's self. If you where a sort of fish without the ability for memory but still experienced pleasure and pain, it would still be wrong to arbitrarily harm you, but it would be less wrong than harming a fish that was able to remember it's life and experience pleasure and pain.

Pethood in Light of SOALhood

Slavery is traditionally defined as the ownership of one human by another. If we accept that animals are the Subject of a Life (SOAL) then this throws new light on our concept of ownership over nonhuman animals. While there are provisions for animal welfare attached to ownership laws, the fundamental relationship between a human and an nonhuman pet is owner and owned.

Owning a human is clearly different from owning an animal because any human slave's innate capacity to be a rational agent in society is being suppressed when in reality she is completely able to take care of herself given the resources to do so. An animal such as a dog kept as a pet is unlike an enslaved human because that dog is incapable of supporting itself in a nonhuman environment due to it's genetic domesticated genetic heritage and being raised in a domestic setting. However, the SOAL criteria clearly demarcate those animals that are enSOALed as valuing entities that, to some degree, value themselves, unlike ordinary nonhuman objects. 

How does being a valuer make animals different? The most basic difference for SOALs is that since they value their lives and have interests they have the right not to have their interests arbitrarily ignored. This right makes those animals situation different because it refutes the model of animal welfare, where animals are still owned but because we value them they are given protections, instead animals value themselves and thus we are obliged to treat them morally. 

However, does SOALhood obviate the end of human ownership of animals? Can animals be properly considered their own owners because of their ability to value themselves? Certainly human ownership of animals is clearly demarcated from the ownership of SOALless objects, and maybe a more viable way to view our relationship with pets is guardianship rather than ownership.

Locating the Knower

I accept whole heartily the realist claim that there is a real world external to us and that statements can be determined true or false based on weather they match with reality. That being said there are two broad messy points where this clean little system gets messed up. First, we often misperceive and/or misunderstand what is happening in the world, which isn't the worlds fault but our own, and this issue can be gradual overcome by employing such truth finding mechanisms as the scientific method. There is also a very real part of the world that is constructed, though none-the-less really a existing in the world.

Realists tend to neglect that the place where 'we' (the knower, doer, thinker, judger) seem to reside is in the space between the mind and the real world. The mind is a real world unto itself just as the world external to the mind is, though certainly a different sort of place. Human society is a community of subjects all experiencing their own mind and sharing that experience as mediated by the external 'real' world. The messy bit is that we don't really know how to deal with this internal world because we are only one preceiver dealing with a whole internal world.

Maybe this understanding of ontology can be used to build to a more sophisticated and solid ethics.

Hi World!

I'm Brian, we weren't told to do an introductory post, but I feel like it's customary. I'm a sophomore philosophy major from Tewksbury, which is out in EMass. Metaphysically i'm a hard determinist and epistemologicaly a fallible realist and as such the world is a dank damp dark place where its objects are constantly misapprehended and we are thrown about by the essentially arbitrary whims of a determined fate. Resultingly I seriously doubt there is any inherent moral value in things and morality thus must be derived from our collective desire to get along and accomplish things together.

I am a veggie, though I sort of wish I wasn't so I could contribute to the diversity of opinions in class. In the future when I am not dependent on Aramark for so much of my food I plan to be vegan. I am inspired quite a bit by my younger brother who went vegan at 15 and is now getting involved with animal rights activism. As a Buddhist I take the whole 'may all beings be free from fear and suffering' bit rather seriously.

I hope this class gives me a better understanding of the dimensions and depth of animal's role in human society so that in the future I can make more informed decisions about what is moral behavior when relating to non-human animals.