There is a difference between a moral duty to refrain from harming something or someone and a moral duty to care for something or someone.
If a child fell into a lake and couldn’t swim would you have a moral duty to rescue that child?
The answer depends on the situation. Can you swim? Are there crocodiles in the lake? Is the water freezing cold? All of those factors must be considered before determining one's moral duty.
This is the stray animal analogy. The colony of feral cats living in the alley might be getting along just fine with plenty of food scraps and minimal threats or there might be an evil person trying to poison them. The danger they are in combined with the danger of rescuing them must be considered. There is no moral duty to "rescue" stray cats.
However, if you pushed a child into a lake you would most certainly have a duty to rescue the child.
This is the companion animal analogy. Humans created the situation that makes surplus companion animals reliant on humans to survive. We've over-bred cats, dogs, rabbits and other companion animals and now they are shelter animals. Humans created the problem, therefore, we are responsible for the solution. We should protect and care for those animals. We have a moral duty to care for them.
If you were deciding whether or not to push the child into the lake, is it your moral duty to refrain? Yes.
This is the veganism analogy. We have a moral duty to refrain from harming others. We must inflict as little pain as possible for our survival. We have a duty to refrain from killing whenever possible.
1 comment:
There is no difference between act and omission. What is called an "omission" is really a decision to do something other than whatever is characterized as the "action" in question. By shifting the baseline perspective, any omission flips to act. For example a vegan can be seen as acting, either "giving up meat" or eating much more vegetable matter, but only if meat consumption is the baseline. In this circumstance the omnivores only sin is one of omission. If the baseline is switched to vegetable consumption, the meat eater is the one acting by choosing to kill and eat animals.
Any attempts to mitigate the moral significance of so-called omissions is a veiled effort to protect the status quo by characterizing the status quo as baseline, thereby immunizing action in conformity with the status quo from moral inquiry by naming it "omission".
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