The United States, like other countries facing rising health care costs, is pursuing a commitment to interoperable electronic health records. Electronic records, it is thought, have the potential to reduce the risks of error, improve care coordination, monitor care quality, enable patients to participate more fully in care management, and provide the data needed for research and surveillance. Interoperable electronic health records on a national scale — the ideal of a national health information network (or NHIN) — seem likely to magnify these advantages. Thus, the recent economic stimulus package contains considerable funding for the development of “health information technology architecture that will support the nationwide electronic exchange and use of health information in a secure, private, and accurate manner.”

It is a welcome development when academic philosophy starts to concern itself with practical issues, in such a way as to influence people's lives. Recently this has happened with one moral issue in particular—but infortunately it is the wrong issue, and people's actions have been influenced in the wrong way. The issue is that of the moral status and treatment of animals. A number of philosophers have argued for what they call ‘animal liberation’, comparing it directly with egalitarian causes such as women's liberation and racial equality and suggesting that, if racism and sexism are rationally indefensible, so is ‘speciesism’. If one ought to give equal consideration to the interests of all human beings, then, so they daim, one must on the same grounds and in the same way recognize that ‘all animals are equal’, be they human or non-human. We believe that this assimilation of ‘animal liberation’ to human liberation movements is mistaken.