"The defect in this argument is that it assumes that the basis of ethics is life, whereas ethics is concerned, not with life, but with consciousness. The question ever asked by ethics is not, Does the thing live? but. Does it feel? It is impossible to do right and wrong to that which is incapable of sentient experience. Ethics arises with consciousness and is coextensive with it. We have no ethical relation to the clod, the molecule, or the scale sloughed off from our skin on the back of our hand, because the clod, the molecule, and the scale have no feeling, no soul, no anything rendering them capable of being affected by us. And the same thing is true of the cabbage, and the onion, and of plants generally. The fact that a thing is an organism, that it has organisation, has in itself no more ethical significance than the fact that it has symmetry, or redness, or weight."
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Activists from the United StatesAtheists from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsAnti-vivisectionists
Original Language: English
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._Howard_Moore
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J. Howard Moore
John Howard Moore (December 4, 1862 – June 17, 1916) was an American zoologist, philosopher, educator and social reformer. He advocated for the ethical consideration and treatment of animals and authored several articles, books, essays and pamphlets on topics including education, ethics, evolutionary biology, humanitarianism, utilitarianism and vegetarianism. He is best known for his work The Universal Kinship (1906), which advocated for a secular sentiocentric philosophy he called the doctrine
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