Assisted migration, an ecosystem engineering technology, is receiving increasing attention and significant support as a means to save biodiversity in a changing climate. Few substantive, or not obviously deficient, reasons have been offered for why pursuing this conservation goal via these means might be good. Some proponents of AM, including those who identify themselves as “pragmatists,” even suggest there is little need for such argument. We survey the principal reasons offered for AM, as well as reasons offered for not offering (...) reasons. As exemplified by the case for translocating whitebark pine, which may at first seem especially strong, we note the incongruence of framing the goal of AM in terms of “saving biodiversity,” neglect of some crucial moral questions, marginalization of normative and scientific context when AM is cast as the lesser of two evils in a “crisis,” doubtful validity and, in any case, marginal importance of arguments that AM projects ought to be undertaken, inconsistent use of scientific facts, and omission of science that counters sanguine assessments. All told—even in cases such as whitebark pine for which AM may seem most defensible—there is little reason to think that AM projects are good as means to “save biodiversity,” or good as means to other goals that have accreted into arguments for these projects. (shrink)

This paper responds to Elijah Weber’s “Vulnerability, Dependence, and Special Obligations to Domesticated Animals: A Reply to Palmer”. Weber’s paper develops significant objections to the account of special obligations I developed in my book Animal Ethics in Context, 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. (shrink)