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Review: The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson

10,000 Birds

With those caveats in mind, I took up Dale Peterson’s The Moral Lives of Animals with hope and not a little trepidation. After all, the behaviors we know as “morals&# do make it much easier to live in the groups we humans find ourselves in, and have been forced to adapt as the kinds of groups we live in change.

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Birding Shanghai in June 2022

10,000 Birds

As with Chinese male humans, having your own building is still vital to raising young. One of the established ways to evaluate self-cognition in animals (including humans) is the mirror test. Among humans, there is a tendency to dress very young humans up in the most colorful way possible. Humanity is not very human.

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Moral Vegetarianism, Part 10 of 13

Animal Ethics

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. Suppose that tomorrow a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth, beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals. It is wrong for superior aliens to eat humans.

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Birding Shanghai in October 2022

10,000 Birds

The consultant also suggested increasing readership by catering to highly specific niche interest groups. It seems the ones I got decent photos of are all juveniles – it generally seems to be easier to get photos of juveniles as they have not quite learned to avoid humans. Thank god that this does not apply to humans.

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Moral Vegetarianism, Part 11 of 13

Animal Ethics

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. The Argument from Human Grain Shortage All of the clearly moral arguments for vegetarianism given so far have been in terms of animal rights and suffering. It is argued that beef cattle and hogs are protein factories in reserve.

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On "Wild Justice"

Animal Person

" Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals ," By Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, is the most recent (for me) book that debunks myths about the differences between human and nonhuman animals. Also, Bekoff and Pierce present a descriptive view, not a normative view of morality. There are no judgments.

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J. J. C. Smart on the Moral Status of Animals

Animal Ethics

I assumed that Hume was right in thinking that ultimately morality depends on how we feel about things. In advocating utilitarianism to a group of people I therefore had to express my feelings and appeal to their feelings. I described the feelings to which I wished to appeal as "generalized benevolence."

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