ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 explores animals as a site of everyday morality. It argues that in the context of growing human–animal closeness animals make new types of moral claims, if not demands, on human responsibility. The chapter begins with a self-reflection on the story of Kesi, an orphaned orangutan from Indonesia, who compels me to recognise her as ‘face’, as a ‘particular’ Other who makes moral demands of me. Three specific arguments are made in relation to the blog material. First, the bloggers highlight the importance of a weakened form of responsibility, which involves ‘facing’ up to the silencing of animal death in late-modernity. The remaining two arguments focus on what animals reveal about human moral worlds. Animals are positioned as ‘moral innocents’ who highlight a disordered modernity and, correspondingly, work as a site, through practices such as vegetarianism, to perform ‘good works’ to re-enchant the excesses of a consumer modernity.
