Obligation of Caretaking.

In response to Michael - full post here

I am not convinced that it would ever be morally obligatory to eat a nutritional diet. Each person has a right to eat things of their own choosing, so we could hardly ever oblige someone to eat in a specific way.

Though, I can see an exception, I suppose. A caretaker, for instance, should refrain from eating a diet so awful that they will not live long enough to fulfill their duties as a caretaker. This also depends on the object of ones care. Children, parrots, chimps, certain dogs (like seeing-eye dogs), et cetera, can all sustain incredible emotional damage from the death of a caretaker; many animals will refuse to eat when their caretaker dies, and will therefore die themselves.

The obligation of caretaking for more intelligent beings overrules many other choices that would otherwise be a matter of personal preference. A person should not do substantially risky things if they are in charge of the well-being of another individual because the choice involves more than their individual preference.

Thank you for this post; I appreciate the thoughts to which it helped lead me.

Also, while I don't necessarily agree with objective morals (I don't know if they exist) I don't know if it is appropriate to consider culture, religion, and time when discussing morality. Access to information is important, I agree.

Humans and Animals (and 'Racism'?)

Humans and animals. Humans or animals. Humans vs. animals. Are these legitimate separations?

Humans are animals; so, from where does this fictional distinction come? I honestly cannot say when or where humans began to use 'animals' exclusively to describe non-human animals. I can say that I think that the choice to continue to separate them in this way is harmful, in addition to being false and dishonest, to humans and non-human animals. I also wonder about the relation between this separation and the separation of 'race.' 'Race' is not a thing that actually exists; instead, 'race' refers to phenotypic characteristics like the darkness of one's skin. Also, as I understand it, humans also may have unnecessarily changed our species name; the move to referring to homo sapiens was not biologically justified. It seems like these problems all have the related problem of creating arbitrary distinctions.

I usually (it is difficult to break a habit) refer to non-human animals as non-human animals, and I usually refer to people of different 'races' by referring to the comparative darkness or lightness of their skin tone.

Sorry this is sort of jumbled up in an awful mess of thoughts. Do you folks have any thoughts about these things?

Anthropomorphism or Anthropocentrism

In response to Andrew - full post here

While I think it is true that humans and non-human animals do not have the same rights, I am not sure how much I agree with the describing the comparison of humans and non-human animals as anthropomorphism. It's true that it seems, on its face, that we are taking animals and comparing them to humans; in a way that is precisely what we are doing.

Still, and put more clearly, what we are actually doing is recognizing the characteristics that humans and non-human animals share. Evolution is a process, and as such, we find elements of certain traits in less evolved animals. I suppose we could say that humans have (slightly more evolved) non-human animal traits.

It's not fair to say pigs are like humans because they are curious, but it is fair to say pigs and humans share, in some way, the trait that is curiosity. The truth is that animals are similar, and it would be some sort of intellectually neglectful and dishonest to not recognize those similarities and the importance that those similarities have.

It seems that the Animal Agricultural Alliance, through calling this comparison anthropomorphism, is actually demonstrating anthropocentrism of a sort.