@Dark Dragon: I'm sorry if I offended any human supremacist feelings you might have but the primary thrust of my argument was not meant to take a position on the issue of whether humans are or are not superior to everything else in the universe in any objective or even subjective sense, but to say that the concept that humans are superior (and thus are subject to expectations that animals aren't ) is itself an abstract concept which humans came up with and kept around because it was useful to humanity as a species to give individuals a reason to put the community above themselves. While I think this is a useful abstraction for human interactions I don't think it's necessarily meaningful outside of the scope human interactions and thus universal.

For example, I would agree that stealing, even when desperate, warrants an apology or some other expression of remorse in the abstract morality that most of humanity can mostly agree on (thanks to the expansion of Western ideology throughout the world). However at the same time I think that what truly matters is not that a thief apologizes to the person they stole from but that the victim, and perhaps the greater community as well, have their feelings of disquiet about the theft assuaged in some way, however that needs to happen. It seems to me that the maid lives by a similarly flexible morality system considering she only cared about the 'serious crime' of runaway serfs until she decided to philosophy bomb the uneducated serfs into trading their freedom for the hope that the the demon queen would be a better master than their former landlord. Of course from our perspective we know the demon queen will be a gracious and wonderful employer who will enrich the lives of the children but if you step back from what we know about the demon queen and take a more cynical stance it looks like the maid just convinced the children that it was in their best interest to exchange their dubious freedom for a new master and the maid and picked up two cheap laborers to help her with chores for very little effort.