Title: A Subtitle

In response Brian - full post here

I would agree with your assessment of our moral ability to constrain non-human animals in certain situations. I would compare our ability to interfere with the lives of non-humans to our ability to interfere with the lives of human children.

Human children certainly have conscious, physiological, and psychological interests. We have the moral ability, and perhaps even the moral obligation to prevent children from causing severe harm to themselves. We should prevent children from crossing busy roads, doing hard drugs, harming other people, et cetera. From this I suppose we'd have to conclude that we are obligated to take care of non-human animals in the same way. Though this might be dangerous if we take the argument to its absurd conclusion: we are morally obligated to prevent as much serious harm as we can.

I do wonder if, to get around this, we can make a distinction between the animals of whom we are guardians and animals who don't have guardians. The distinction seems (and probably is) irrelevant, but I can't see how we could avoid the aforementioned conclusion and its negative consequences.

Subjects vs. Motivations

in response to Kurtiss - full post here

The question of who to blame for the immoral actions of a moral patient is quite an interesting one. Practically, however, blame is quite irrelevant because we cannot change the  events of the past. More importantly, we should strive to make sure that the same immoral action does not occur again.

It can certainly useful to figure out the source of immorality, but blaming the source doesn't really matter. Additionally, it is very difficult to determine how many sources there were, and to what extend they influenced the action. We should, regardless of source or blame, provide resources to make sure that the action doesn't happen again.

Using your example of the dog and the neighbors guardian, we can take a number of different actions. We can encourage the guardian to help the neighbor replant the garden. We can help the guardian to pay for training classes. We can help both the neighbor and the guardian to purchase a fence to keep the dog out. We can do many things to prevent the action.

I think it is important to not focus on blame. Even in the case of human-committed immoral acts, blame isn't as important as rehabilitation and prevention. Blame (which focuses on subjects) leads us to retribution and revenge, while identifying a causes (motivations and reasons) can help us to prevent harm, while helping humans and non-humans alike.