The dog, unlike the human, does not have will and as such cannot override its desires. The will of the human is able to override a desire or impulse. As such, a human can be held liable in a way that a dog cannot.
I think this may be slightly missing the point. We hold humans liable not because they can override desires—dogs can do that also, btw, as they may avoid some delicious food if they think they may get in trouble for eating it—but instead because they have the ability to perform moral reasoning, i.e., to think about the “right” thing to do. The “knee-jerk” intelligence response does get partway there, but it fails to identify what about intelligence creates the liability. It’s the fact that a human, uniquely among animals, can reason about “right and wrong” behavior as opposed to reasoning only about personally or socially optimal behavior, which many other animals are capable of.
What most folks fail to realize about “objective” morality is that the source of objectivity is almost always a subjective choice. In the case of Christianity, for example, you choose, moment to moment, to follow that religion’s tenets and make it your basis for moral reasoning. If you stop preferring it, you’ll switch to another means of making moral choices. It doesn’t get more subjective than that.
The dog, unlike the human, does not have will and as such cannot override its desires. The will of the human is able to override a desire or impulse. As such, a human can be held liable in a way that a dog cannot.
I think this may be slightly missing the point. We hold humans liable not because they can override desires—dogs can do that also, btw, as they may avoid some delicious food if they think they may get in trouble for eating it—but instead because they have the ability to perform moral reasoning, i.e., to think about the “right” thing to do. The “knee-jerk” intelligence response does get partway there, but it fails to identify what about intelligence creates the liability. It’s the fact that a human, uniquely among animals, can reason about “right and wrong” behavior as opposed to reasoning only about personally or socially optimal behavior, which many other animals are capable of.
What most folks fail to realize about “objective” morality is that the source of objectivity is almost always a subjective choice. In the case of Christianity, for example, you choose, moment to moment, to follow that religion’s tenets and make it your basis for moral reasoning. If you stop preferring it, you’ll switch to another means of making moral choices. It doesn’t get more subjective than that.