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Down the road of veganism I go, one philosophical step at a time. The first step in becoming vegan was, for me, realizing that morality is not, as is currently vogue to think of it, a business transaction. It is not an unwritten contract between two “moral agents” to agree to certain constraints and obligations. Morality exists regardless of the object of moral consideration being able to reciprocate. Anything else is patently ridiculous, as is elegantly reasoned by Joel Marks in the current issue of Philosophy Now.

As he so succinctly puts it: “The moral worth of a being should depend on the nature of the being and not on our attitude towards it.” and the excellent ending:

…so far as we know, the only valuers are animals, and all animals are valuers. Therefore animals move to the center of what ethics is all about. The discussion of nonhuman animals turns out to be not some special issue of ‘applied ethics’, but rather part of ethics’ core (we human animals are the rest of it). I would say, then, that ethics is animal ethics.

Go read it and ponder.