Response to "Vulnerability, Dependence, and Special Obligations to Domesticated Animals" by Elijah Weber
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2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. This paper responds to Elijah Webers Vulnerability, Dependence, and Special Obligations to Domesticated Animals: A Reply to Palmer. Webers paper develops significant objections to the account of special obligations I developed in my book Animal Ethics in Context (Columbia University Press, New York, 2010), 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.
