Response to “Vulnerability, Dependence, and Special Obligations to Domesticated Animals” by Elijah Weber

Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28 (4):695-703 (2015)
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Abstract

This paper responds to Elijah Weber’s “Vulnerability, Dependence, and Special Obligations to Domesticated Animals: A Reply to Palmer”. Weber’s paper develops significant objections to the account of special obligations I developed in my book Animal Ethics in Context, in particular concerning our obligations to companion animals. In this book, I made wide-ranging claims about how we may acquire special obligations to animals, including being a beneficiary of an institution that creates vulnerable and dependent animals, and sharing in attitudes that contribute to causing harms or to creating vulnerable animals. Weber finds these claims implausible, and offers an alternative, much narrower, voluntarist account, on which we only have special positive obligations if, in some way, we have agreed to them. In this paper, I defend, against Weber, a non-voluntarist account of at least some special obligations towards animals, and I respond to some of his more specific objections to my account.

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Clare Alexandra Palmer
Texas A&M University

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References found in this work

Famine, affluence, and morality.Peter Singer - 1972 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (3):229-243.
Animal Ethics in Context.Clare Palmer - 2010 - Columbia University Press.
Group responsibility for ethnic conflict.Virginia Held - 2002 - The Journal of Ethics 6 (2):157-178.

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