Quotes About Morality

There is something so very dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power. -Cardinal John Henry Newman

The fact that creatures cannot act morally toward us in no way diminishes our ability to act morally toward them.

Even if our dealings with the lowly animals, this sort of relativism works its evils. What makes Mr. Komatsu's argument so insidious is its denial that there are realities about animals, that these realities are in crucial respects knowable, and that once known, we are morally obliged to accept and to act upon them regardless of culture or personal preference.

Everyone who derives pleasure from tormenting animals, or watching the torment, insists they do so for only the loftiest motives.

Much as I admire anyone who bothers to take the matter seriously, some theorists, at least in their more abstract arguments, miss a crucial point by assuming that to be cared for, a creature must somehow be made our equal, which isn't even true in our human affairs, where often those we love most are the weak and vulnerable.

Gratuitous cruelty cannot take cover behind the fact of inevitable suffering.

When we condemn cruelty to animals, we don't call it un-American, or un-European, or un-Japanese. We call it inhumane.

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even where animals are concerned.

When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs just too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that here what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

For me it was a simple moral step of extending that vision out into the world, for what are dogs but affable emissaries from the animal kingdom?

We may not know or agree upon moral truths. But we do know that opposite things cannot at the same time ne true: identical creatures at the same time capable of suffering and incapable of suffering, worthy of moral consideration and unworthy of such concern, within the reach of God's love and beneath it.

Just as in logic a thing cannot be and not be at the same time, in moral reasoning identical creatures cannot be worthy of moral consideration and unworthy of moral consideration; this dog or dolphin or elephant morally significant and those others are not.

When we call something a necessary evil, something requiring the suffering or death of a fellow creature, the evil is real and it had better be necessary.

It would be enough if more of us would simply compare our own principles, our own vision of life and nature, whether secular or religious or somewhere in between, wit the reality of how animals are actually treated, often in our name. If such things cannot be justified, if the great majority of us find them reprehensible and wrong and unworthy of humanity, then why on earth are they all permitted? Why do we tolerate them, in our lives and in our laws?

Compassion for animals doesn't drain away some finite reserve of moral energy and idealism, to the detriment of human welfare, but surely adds to the supply.

The moral value of any creature belongs to that creature, acknowledged or not, a different value from our own but just as much a hard and living reality. Just as our own individual moral worth does not hinge on the opinion of others, their moral worth does not hinge upon our estimation of them. Whatever it is, it is.

All predators are limited in the kind and duration of suffering they can inflict and in the level of moral degradation of which they are capable. We are not.

Leave us to our whale, as the whalers say, and we will leave you to your McDonalds and pork chops. They have a point. If you can have your favorites treats from the factory farm, why on earth can't others have their whale meal, or others their racks or ivory or fur coats or macaque brains or whatever? By what moral standard may we condemn any practice?

We may not know or agree upon moral truths. But we do know that opposite things cannot at the same time be true: identical creatures at the same time capable of suffering and incapable of suffering, worthy of moral consideration and unworthy of such concern, within the reach of God's love and beneath it.

The very industries clinging to such theories employ cats and dogs and chimps and so many other animals in laboratory test of analgesics and surgeries, a useless exercise unless they experience physical pain comparable to ours.

Justice does not exist in the abstract," Epicurus flatly asserts; it is just "a compact to not harm or be harmed";

Philip Livingston, too, alludes to the virtuous atheist in his magazine from the 1750s: "It is an Opinion too generally received, that Man is led into all the Crimes and Extravagancies he commits, thro' Unbelief. And no Wonder this Doctrine, false as it is, should be so vigorously inculcated by Men whose Interest consists in a Depression of rational Faculties."174

Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness. Utility the test of virtue.

What do you do when the devil turns up in your living room and offers you everything you want?