Q&A Question 1

-Where is the line between person-hood and being an animal, are there important qualities that overlap?

Ultimately the root of the the question of weather or not it is moral to kill/harm animals. It's already quite obvious that it is wrong to kill or harm a human, with certain exceptions of course.

I think the relevant difference is that they do not automatically invoke the same amount of empathy within us, the way we get from another human being. This may be a cultural convention. It may have been that in the past humans had no empathy fostered in them by their milieux and where more capable of harming and killing each other. The most relevant overlap is more metaphysical. The overlap is that they have the capacity to feel pain and, intuitively, I think that certain animals have 'consciousness' or some continuous experience of living comparable to human's.

The basis for my own argument for animal ethics is both that animals do have certain capacities that would seem to put them on a similar level of moral consideration as humans. Secondly, we would want to enforce the ethical treatment of animals because their mistreatment could inspire a lack of empathy and lead the animal abuser to be more comfortable with abusing humans.