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Tom Regan on Cruelty

Animal Ethics

Cruelty is manifested in different ways. The central case of cruelty appears to be the case where, in Locke's apt phrase, one takes "a seeming kind of Pleasure" in causing another to suffer. Let us term this sadistic cruelty. Some cruel people do not feel pleasure in making others suffer.

Cruelty 40
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John Passmore (1914-2004) on the History of Animal Cruelty

Animal Ethics

Whereas it once used to be argued, as by Newman , that the least human good compensates for any possible amount of animal suffering, the current doctrine is that it requires a considerable good to compensate for such suffering.

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John Passmore (1914-2004) on the Moral Status of Animals

Animal Ethics

And by this they mean not only that it is wrong to enjoy torturing animals—which few moralists would ever have wished explicitly to deny, however little emphasis they might have placed on cruelty to animals in their moral teaching—but that it is wrong to cause them to suffer unnecessarily. Controversies no doubt remain.

Morals 40
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John Passmore (1914-2004) on Bentham's Treatment of Animals

Animal Ethics

" but "Can they suffer?" It is enough that they are capable of suffering. The Traités edited by Dumont condemn cruelty to animals only—if Dumont can be trusted—on the ground that it can give rise to indifference to human suffering.

2004 40
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From Today's New York Times

Animal Ethics

While cruelty to animals is a serious matter that should elicit widespread public outrage, efforts to reach the public through more serious means often fall on deaf ears in a world in which sex sells and there are both a war and an economic downturn. Animal suffering and human suffering are undeniably interconnected.