A couple months back, Speculative Heresy and The Inhumanities announced a cross-blog event for which they invited short but substantive pieces to answer the following question:

“While speculative realism has critiqued anthropocentrism in ontology, and critical animal studies has critiqued anthropocentrism in ethics, there has yet to be many productive connections made between the two. With each offering the other important insights, the question to be asked is, what is the relation between ethics and ontology? Does a realist ontology require the suspension of any ethical imperatives? Can ethics and norms be grounded in something real? Are nonhuman actors capable of ethical relations?”

The posts start this week and will run through next week. The first is from Pete Wolfendale (of Deontologistics), entitled The Rational Animal?. Wolfendale's central point is that responsibility is grounded in rationality, and that ethics therefore falls under the purview of ontology if the latter addresses the question of what the rational is.

I've written a piece on the ethics of objects for the series, which should appear sometime during the next two weeks. More on that when it appears.