Quotes About Justice

It's an odd thing is a professional gone bad. They talk about bent coppers, but what about bent lawyers, bent accountants, bent doctors? If push came to shove, would you expect one crooked businessman to stick up for another?

A true Christian militant attacks systems of oppression and fights for a better world even though that new world might negatively affect their own position of power.

Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper.

Worldwide, the poor leave a very small carbon footprint, but they will suffer the most from climate change.

It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.

those who have enough to spend on luxuries, yet fail to share even a tiny fraction of their income with the poor, must bear some responsibility for the deaths they could have prevented.

If it is so easy to help people in real need through no fault of their own, and yet we fail to do so, aren't we doing something wrong? At a minimum, I hope this book will persuade you that there is something deeply askew with our widely accepted views about what it is to live a good life.

moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.

What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have.

Pacifists have usually regarded the use of violence as absolutely wrong, irrespective of its consequences. This, like other 'no matter what' prohibitions, assumes the validity of the distinction between acts and omissions. Without this distinction, pacifists who refuse to use violence when it is the only means of preventing greater violence would be responsible for the greater violence they fail to prevent.

Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval scholar whose ideas became the semi-official philosophy of the Roman Catholic church, wrote that whatever we have in "superabundance"—that is, above and beyond what will reasonably satisfy our own needs and those of our family, for the present and the foreseeable future—"is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance.

If we reject, as we must, the doctrine that the majority is always right, to submit moral issues to the vote is to gamble that what we believe to be right will come out of the ballot with more votes behind it than what we believe to be wrong; and that is a gamble we will often lose.

Unless you can refute the central argument of this book, you should now recognize that speciesism is wrong, and this means that, if you take morality seriously, you should try to eliminate speciesist practices from your own life, and oppose them elsewhere. Otherwise no basis remains from which you can, without hypocrisy, criticize racism or sexism.

Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.

The basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration. Equal consideration for different beings may lead to different treatment and different rights.

Christian magazine Sojourners, likes to point out that the Bible contains more than three thousand references to alleviating poverty—enough reason, he thinks, for making this a central moral issue for Christians.

What she really wants is a place with more tolerance for differences, less emphasis on materialism, where people value creativity and are interested in working on issues relating to peace and justice.

Whereas the property-owning middle class could win freedom for themselves on the basis of rights to property--thus excluding others from the freedom they gain--the property-less working class possess nothing but their title as human beings. Thus they can liberate themselves only by liberating all humanity.

Humanos o no, todos los animales son iguales.

If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, we are not the left.

Bentham señala la capacidad de sufrimiento como la característica básica que le torga a un ser el derecho a una consideración igual

Is the fact that other people are not doing their fair share a sufficient reason for allowing a child to die when you could easily rescue that child? I think the answer is clear: No. The others have, by refusing to help with the rescue, made themselves irrelevant. They might as well be so many rocks. According to the fair-share view, in fact, it would be better for the children if they were rocks, because then you would be obliged to wade back into the pond to save another child.

Some of the conclusions that I draw are very different from the ethical views most people hold today. That, however, is not a ground for dismissing them. If every proposal for reform in ethics that differed from accepted moral views had been rejected for that reason alone, we would still be torturing heretics, enslaving members of conquered races, and treating women as the property of their husbands.

Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.