Quotes About Ethics

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

If this animal is to be protected, why not that identical one, too? If it is cruelty to confine or mistreat a dog, a cat, or even a pet lamb or pig, why is it not cruelty to confine and mistreat millions of equally sensitive animals at Smithfield, IBP, ConAngra, and other such places? When we speak of the unavoidable severity of livestock production or laboratory experiments or trapping, and so on, just how rigorously are we defining unavoidable?

That is the whole idea of mercy, after all, that it is entirely discretionary, entirely undeserved.... There is no such thing as a right to mercy, not for the animals and not even for us.

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.

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.

We can challenge farming practices today without passing judgement on the whole of human experience.

When we assert our reason as our authority for dominion, we must use that authority reasonably. When we assert free will as our distinctive human quality, we must use our free will not only in acts of self-interest but in acts of self-restraint.

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.

Mr Wallace is sitting beside a dying elk. If elk could scream, he reflects, the woods would have fewer hunters.

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.

Granting Digby that one can be too emotional about animals, it seems fair to ask if one cannot also be a little to emotional about food. Why is it excessive sentimentality to see rabbits as our harmless fluffy tailed friends, but not excessive sentimentality to go on and on about rabbits soaked in rich gravy with the parsley and Dijon mustard and stock from the paws and head and old England and all the rest?

In the same way, one might well ask what good it does to keep the elephants alive at all if their sole value on earth is a hunter's fee. Why even bother if we think so little of these creatures, after all that they have endured at the hands of man, that we are now willing to let them be farmed and administered in this nice, systematic way by the very people who have already done them so much evil?

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.

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, with 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?

That is the whole idea o mercy, after all, that it is entirely discretionary, entirely undeserved.... There is no such thing as a right to mercy, not for the animals and not even for us.

Tolerance of the factory farms dictates a tolerance of just about everything else, in effect moving the ethical bar lower and lower until, after a while, the critical faculties break down and one cruelty is used to justify another - new necessary evils defended and permitted merely because the old ones still go on.... We cannot seriously question anything because we are not thinking seriously at all.

Those who dismiss love for our fellow creatures as mere sentimentality overlook a good and important part of our humanity.

For all we know it, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate, blunt, arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an animal shelter or a slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal suffering might not at times be all the more terrifying and all-encompassing without benefit of the words and concepts that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but consolation. Whatever is going on inside their heads, it doesn't seem mere to them.

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.

When the safety of a state depends on any man's good faith, and its affairs cannot be administered properly unless its rulers choose to act from good faith, it will be very unstable," Spinoza notes.