Discerning a Framework for the Treatment of Animals and the Natural World in the Bahá’í Writings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Discussions about the proper relationship between humans and animals can easily degenerate into what the Universal House of Justice calls “the all too common tendencies . . . to delineate sharp dichotomies . . . and engage in intractable debate that obstructs the search for viable solutions” (29 November 2017). This paper first uses an exegetical approach to discern a Bahá’í framework governing the treatment of animals, and our relationship to the natural world more broadly. Next, a self-reflexive examination of the author’s own relationship with animals is used to demonstrate how such a framework can directly inform the individual’s way of being in the world, in a manner that is both faithful to the Bahá’í teachings on the subject, and responsive to differences in individuals’ circumstances. Finally, it suggests that by presenting an internally coherent position in which an ethics of kindness and justice flows from underlying ontological principles, this framework hold promise for transcending the dichotomy between domination-themed narratives that assign purely instrumental value to the natural world, and materialistic narratives that deny any unique status to the human being.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".