Quotes About Ethics

There is no 'need' for us to eat meat, dairy or eggs. Indeed, these foods are increasingly linked to various human diseases and animal agriculture is an environmental disaster for the planet.

Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.

We do not need to eat animals, wear animals, or use animals for entertainment purposes, and our only defense of these uses is our pleasure, amusement, and convenience.

If you are not vegan, please consider going vegan. It's a matter of nonviolence. Being vegan is your statement that you reject violence to other sentient beings, to yourself, and to the environment, on which all sentient beings depend.

People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices

We can no more justify using nonhumans as human resources than we can justify human slavery. Animal use and slavery have at least one important point in common: both institutions treat sentient beings exclusively as resources of others. That cannot be justified with respect to humans; it cannot be justified with respect to nonhumans—however "humanely" we treat them.

When it comes to animals, we suffer from moral schizophrenia.

Baz? hayvanlar? sevip onlara ailemizin birer üyesi gibi muamele ederken, onlara hissetme yetilerinden, duygusal kapasitelerinden, kendilerinin fark?nda olan birer ki?i olduklar?ndan asla ?üphe duymazken, onlardan hiç de farkl? olmayan ba?ka hayvanlar?n ölü bedenlerine çatal b?çaklar?m?z? saplamam?za neden olan ahlaki ?izofrenimize son vermemiz gerekir!

To say that a sentient being is not harmed by death denies that the being has the very interest that sentience serves to perpetuate. It would be analogous to saying that a being with eyes does not have an interest in continuing to see or is not harmed by being made blind. The Jains of India expressed it well long ago: "All beings are fond of life, like pleasure, hate pain, shun destruction, like life, long to live. To all life is dear.

In short, humans possess no characteristic unique to themselves that can justify differential treatment solely on the basis of species.

Whatever characteristic we identify as possessed only by humans will not be possessed by all humans. Some humans will have the exact same deficiency that we attribute to animals, and although we may not allow such humans to drive cars or attend universities, most of us would shut out the prospect of enslaving such humans, using them as unconsenting subjects in biomedical research, or otherwise using them exclusively as a means to an ends.

The ability to communicate may be relevant to whether we make you the host of a talk show, or give you a job teaching in a university, but it is not relevant to whether we should kill you and remove your organs for transplant into another human, or whether we should enslave you so that you may labor for those without your particular disability.

We cannot simultaneously regard animals as resources and as beings with moral significant interests. IN an effort to provide humane treatment for animals, we tried to prohibit the infliction of unnecessary suffering through animal welfare laws that assumed from the outset that animals were resources from human use.

We would finally have to confront our moral schizophrenia about animals, which leads us to love some animals, treat them as members of our family, and never once doubt their sentience, emotional capacity, self-awareness, or personhood, but at the same time we stick dinner forks into other animals who are indistinguishable in any relevant sense from our animal companions.

If people defend the imposition of pain and suffering on animals based on what is "natural" or "traditional", it usually means that they cannot otherwise justify their conduct.

Old habits die hard, but that does not mean they are morally justified. It is precisely in situations where both moral issues and strong personal preference is coming to play that we should be most careful to think clearly. As the case of meat-eating shows, however, sometimes our brute preferences determine a moral thinking rather than the other way around. Many people have said to me "Yes I know it's morally wrong to eat meat, but I just love hamburgers.

Our conduct merely demonstrates that despite what we say about the moral significance of animal interests, we are willing to ignore those interests whenever we benefit from doing so - even when the benefit is nothing more than our pleasure or convenience.

If we take morality seriously, then we must confront what it dictates: if it is wrong for Simon to torture dogs for pleasure, then it is morally wrong for us to eat meat.

but if someone's character has no foundation, there's nothing to build on.

I don't believe in the concept of hell, but if I did I would think of it as filled with people who were cruel to animals.

If you're gonna shoot an elephant Mr. Schneider, you better be prepared to finish the job.

There's a code of honor in sports, Guerin believed. You do not deliberately embarrass your opponent or set records outside the normal flow of the game. The Warriors were breaking a code.

You are what you do and you do what you must

A state that claims to be a savior of mankind necessarily becomes the final judge of mankind.