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

Animal Ethics

The degree of restriction placed on human behavior, furthermore, is relatively slight. 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 Bentham's Treatment of Animals

Animal Ethics

"The French have already discovered," Bentham wrote, "that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. " but "Can they suffer?" It is enough that they are capable of suffering.

2004 40
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Tom Regan on Utilitarianism

Animal Ethics

Especially because animals are made to suffer in the pursuit of human purposes—in the name of "efficient" factory farming, for example, or in pursuit of scientific knowledge—the utilitarian injunction to count their suffering and to count it equitably must strike a responsive moral chord. Because animals are sentient (i.e.,

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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. That, on the whole, is the Christian tradition.

Morals 40
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Tom Regan on Cruelty

Animal Ethics

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. Some cruel people do not feel pleasure in making others suffer. Let us term this sadistic cruelty. Indeed, they seem not to feel anything.

Cruelty 40
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From Today's New York Times

Animal Ethics

By comparing the common mind-set that has produced both the past injustices against humans and the current abuses of animals, we can and do inspire debate and convince many people that it is a human obligation to speak out against injustice to all beings. Animal suffering and human suffering are undeniably interconnected.

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Deconstructing Slate's "Pepper" Series

Animal Person

For Engber, who dispassionately describes procedures most of the time, the "advances" in the medical care of humans are all well worth what he and other vivisectionists do to dogs and other sentient nonhumans. By the end of my time as researcher, I was performing behavioral experiments on humans. It "guarantees humane treatment?"