EA-relatable quotes

“Suppose there were discovered relicted populations in the forests of Africa between humans and chimpanzees. What would we do, what would those speciesists do, if a live specimen of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) were to be discovered? It’s a pure accident that they’re extinct. We ought to do be able to do something about our morals and our ethics taking account of the fact that they might not have been extinct. This major ethical distinction should not depend upon the mere accident of extinction.”

— Richard Dawkins in Speciesism: The Movie (2013)

“If a curiously selective plague came along and killed all people of intermediate height, ‘tall’ and ‘short’ would come to have just as precise a meaning as ‘bird’ or ‘mammal’. The same is true of human ethics and law. Our legal and moral systems are deeply species-bound. The director of a zoo is legally entitled to ‘put down’ a chimpanzee that is surplus to requirements, while any suggestion that he might ‘put down’ a redundant keeper or ticket-seller would be greeted with howls of incredulous outrage. The chimpanzee is the property of the zoo. Humans are nowadays not supposed to be anybody’s property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees in this way is seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all. Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! [T]he only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.”

— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“[T]hink about something like the raging debate about abortion. People get very, very hot under the collar about killing a tiny, few celled embryo because it’s human. Whereas this tiny, little human embryo is far less capable of feeling pain, of feeling fear, of feeling hurt certainly than an adult pig or cow. And there’s virtually no difference between a human embryo and a cow embryo or a pig embryo.”

— Richard Dawkins, interview and Q&A in Greece (April 26, 2015)

“Could we call a mass killing of Neanderthals a genocide? What about a mass killing of Homo erectus? What about Australopithecus? What about chimpanzees? When does it stop being a genocide? The idea that the distinction between humans and non-humans is based on science and reason is a farce. It’s as morally arbitrary and unscientific as discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual orientation.”

— Jay Shooster

“Why [s]hould the boundary of sacrosanct life match the boundary of our species?”

— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“We live in a speciesist society, all of us do. We regard humans as being ultra-special, such that cannibalism is an absolute, total no-no. And yet if you think about the fact that we all are evolved beings, we are cousins of all living creatures, if by any chance the intermediates between humans and other species we’re all living still (they just happen to be extinct, but if they weren’t), we would they have to decide does this one count as human, can we eat that one or is that one too human? As it happens, we don’t have to face this dilemma because the intermediates are all extinct, therefore we [are biased towards being] speciesist.”

— Richard Dawkins, interview and Q&A in Greece (April 26, 2015)

“Tens of billions of [non-human animals] have been subjected over the last two centuries to a regime of industrial exploitation, whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.”

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens (2014)

“Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.”

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“I intervene to reduce suffering, regardless of whether it’s natural or not.”

— unknown

“Suppose we’re 90% confident that all generations have equal moral value, and believe there’s a 10% chance that only the current generation matters. (There are other possibilities but let’s narrow it down to these two for simplicity’s sake.) There’s no agreed-upon method for handling this kind of moral uncertainty, but let’s say we handle it by assigning resources to each moral system in proportion to our confidence in it and then let each system “buy” what it wants. So if we have $1 million, we give $900,000 to our first moral system which says that all generations have equal moral value, and $100,000 to our second system which only values the current generation. Then each system can use the money on whatever intervention it believes is best, or they can trade with each other.”

— Michael Dickens, How Should a Large Donor Prioritize Cause Areas?

“To argue from ‘we don’t understand the cognitive basis for consciousness’ to ‘it’s OK to eat non-humans’ is acting as though our ignorance were positive knowledge we could confidently set down our weight on. Even if you have a specific cognitive model that predicts ‘there’s an 80% chance cattle can’t suffer,’ you have to be just as cautious as you’d be about torturing a 20%-likely-to-be-conscious person in a non-vegetative coma, or a 20%-likely-to-be-conscious alien.”

— Rob Bensinger, Inhuman altruism: Inferential gap, or motivational gap?

“Confidence about animal psychology (in the direction of ‘it’s relevantly human-like’) and extreme uncertainty about animal psychology can both justify prioritizing animal welfare; but when you’re primarily accustomed to seeing uncertainty about animal psychology used as a rationalization for neglecting animals, it will take increasing amounts of effort to keep the policy proposal and the question-of-fact mentally distinct.”

— Rob Bensinger, Inhuman altruism: Inferential gap, or motivational gap?

“‘Humanity’ does not exist. There are only humans, driven by conflicting needs and illusions, and subject to every kind of infirmity of will and judgement.”

— John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), p. 12

“Every individual is an exception to the rule.”

— Carl Jung

“The antispeciesist claims that, other things being equal, conscious beings of equivalent sentience deserve equal care and respect.”

— David Pearce, The Antispeciesist Revolution (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 2013)

“A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“It is surprising to see such a warm, mushy idea – brotherly love – grow out of a word as cold and clinical as “utilitarianism”. But it shouldn’t be. Brotherly love is implicit in the standard formulations of utilitarianism – maximum total happiness, the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words: everyone’s happiness counts equally; you are not privileged, and you shouldn’t act as if you are.”

— Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (1994), p. 336

“That’s one of the great things about utilitarianism, actually: It’s a form of unconditional love. No matter who the organism is or what he/she has done, his/her happiness and suffering still count just the same.”

— Brian Tomasik

“If the success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?”

— attributed to Buckminster Fuller

“We appear to have a tendency to consider smaller beings “less sentient” and less morally important than bigger ones. It somehow feels like a lobster is much more likely to be sentient than, say, an ant. However, this intuition is far from justified, since an ant brain actually has more than twice as many neurons than the brain of a lobster, while bees and cockroaches both have about ten times as many neurons as a lobster. So, when we think about insects and small beings in general, it is worth planting this flag in the front of our minds: we should not be swayed to believe that these beings matter less simply because they are small.”

— Magnus Vinding, Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong, And The Implications of Rejecting It (2015)

“Nature, as we know, regards ultimately only fitness and not our happiness, and does not scruple to use hate, fear, punishment and even war alongside affection in ordering social groups and selecting among them, just as she uses pain as well as pleasure to get us to feed, water and protect our bodies and also in forging our social bonds.”

— Leonard Katz, Toward Good and Evil

“Most people like to imagine that normal life is happy and that other states are abnormalities that need explanation. This is a pre-Darwinian view of psychology. We were not designed for happiness. Neither were we designed for unhappiness. Happiness is not a goal left unaccomplished by some bungling designer, it is an aspect of a behavioural regulation mechanism shaped by natural selection. The utter mindlessness of natural selection is terribly hard to grasp and even harder to accept. Natural selection gradually sifts variations in DNA sequences. Sequences that create phenotypes with a less-than-average reproductive success are displaced in the gene pool by those that give increased success. This process results in organisms that tend to want to stay alive, get resources, have sex, and take care of children. But these are not the goals of natural selection. Natural selection has no goals: it just mindlessly shapes mechanisms, including our capacities for happiness and unhappiness, that tend to lead to behavior that maximizes fitness. Happiness and unhappiness are not ends; they are means. They are aspects of mechanisms that influence us to act in the interests of our genes.”

— Randolph Nesse, Natural Selection and the Elusiveness of Happiness (The Science of Well-Being, 2005, p. 10)

“Nature is the product of evolution, a blind, indifferent process that’s all about gene survival, not about the well-being of individuals.”

— Lukas Gloor

“The blind forces of evolution do not optimize for happiness. The pain endured by a fish afflicted with parasites or a rat swallowed alive by a snake is no more tolerable than the “natural” suffering of humans due to malaria, cancer, or starvation. Both deserve our attention.”

— Brian Tomasik

“[T]he world is a very dark place. While many moments of people’s lives are filled with laughter and accomplishment, some moments are filled with depression, anxiety, or extreme and unrelenting agony. And the lives of most non-human animals are far worse. It’s easy to become upset and hopeless: Why don’t other people care about extreme suffering? How can they not see how important it is compared with other, more trivial things in life?”

— Brian Tomasik, Strategic Considerations for Moral Antinatalists (Essays on Reducing Suffering)

“Could it really be that sentient beings have died, absolutely, for millions of years. …with no soul and no afterlife… not as any grand plan of Nature, not to teach us about the meaning of life, not even to teach a profound lesson about what is impossible, but… just because? Dead forever, in a world beyond the reach of God.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Beyond the Reach of God (abridged by Raymond Arnold, Nate Soares)

“The view of Cosmic Pessimism is a strange mysticism of the world-without-us, a hermeticism of the abyss, a noumenal occultism. It is the difficult thought of the world as absolutely unhuman, and indifferent to the hopes, desires, and struggles of human individuals and groups. Its limit-thought is the idea of absolute nothingness, unconsciously represented in the many popular media images of nuclear war, natural disasters, global pandemics, and the cataclysmic effects of climate change. Certainly these are the images, or the specters, of Cosmic Pessimism, and different from the scientific, economic, and political realities and underlie them; but they are images deeply embedded in our psyche nonetheless. Beyond these specters there is the impossible thought of extinction, with not even a single human being to think the absence of all human beings, with no thought to think the negation of all thought.”

— Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Volume 1, p. 17

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent – but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

— Stanley Kubrick

“Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist – that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the [cosmos] gives a damn one way or the the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.”

— H. P. Lovecraft, letter to James F. Morton (1929)

“Whether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should each be treated with appropriate respect.”

— Dr. Chandra (2010)

“[I]t seems so unfair: some of us starve to death before we’re out of infancy, while others – by an accident of birth – live out their lives in opulence and splendour. We can be born into an abusive family or a reviled ethnic group, or start out with some deformity; we go through life with the deck stacked against us, and then we die, and that’s it? Nothing but a dreamless and endless sleep? Where’s the justice in this? This is stark and brutal and heartless.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), p. 255

“Even just within our species, 150,000 persons are destroyed each day while countless more suffer an appalling array of torments and deprivations. Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board – contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center. It is important that we not gratuitously replicate such horrors in silico.”

— Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Strategies and Dangers, Chapter 12: Acquiring Values (2014)

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. [T]he universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

— Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Chapter: God’s utility function (1995)

“Our job now is to prepare the ground for forthcoming generations to take action where we may be currently unable to act.”

— Oscar Horta, Disvalue in Nature and Intervention (2010)

“[I]t is when we turn to their treatment of the non-human races that we find the surest evidences of barbarism; yet their savagery, even here, is not wholly “naked and unashamed,” for, strange to say, these curious people delight to mask their rudeness in a cloak of fallacies and sophisms, and to represent themselves as “lovers” of those very creatures whom they habitually torture for “sport,” science,” and the “table.” They actually have a law for the prevention of cruelty to animals, under which certain privileged species, classed as “domestic,” are protected from some specified wrongs, though all the time they may, under certain conditions, be subjected with impunity to other and worse injuries at the hands of the slaughterman or the vivisector; while the wild species, though presumably not less sensitive to pain, are regarded as almost entirely outside the pale of protection, and as legitimate subjects for those brutalities of “fashion” and “sport” which are characteristic of the savage mind.”

— Henry Salt, Seventy Years among Savages (1921), p. 12

“It is arguable [t]hat a further effect of our partiality for members of our own species is a tendency to decreased sensitivity to the lives and well-being of those sentient beings that are not members of our species.

One can discern an analogous phenomenon in the case of nationalism. It frequently happens that the sense of solidarity among the members of a nation motivates them to do for one another all that – and perhaps even more than – they are required to do by impartial considerations. But the powerful sense of collective identity within a nation is often achieved by contrasting an idealized conception of the national character with caricatures of other nations, whose members are regarded as less important or worthy or, in many cases, are dehumanized and despised as inferior or even odious. When nationalist solidarity is maintained. in this way – as it has been in recent years in such places as Yugoslavia and its former provinces – the result is often brutality and atrocity on an enormous scale. Thus, while nationalist sentiment may have beneficial effects within the nation, these are greatly outweighed from an impartial point of view by the dreadful effects that it has on relations between nations.

I believe that our treatment of the severely retarded and our treatment of animals follow a similar pattern. While our sense of kinship with the severely retarded moves us to treat them with great solicitude, our perception of animals as radically “other” numbs our sensitivity to them, allowing us to abuse them in various ways with an untroubled conscience. We are not, of course, aggressively hostile to them the way nationalists often are to the members of rival nations; we are simply indifferent. But indifference to their lives and well-being is sufficient, when conjoined with motives of self-interest, for the flourishing of various practices that involve both killing and the infliction of suffering on a truly massive scale and that go virtually unchallenged in all contemporary human societies: factory farming, slaughtering animals for food or to take their furs, using them for the testing of cosmetic products, killing them for sport, and so on. When one compares the relatively small number of severely retarded human beings who benefit from our solicitude with the vast number of animals who suffer at our hands, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the good effects of our species-based partiality are greatly outweighed by the bad.”

— Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (2002), p. 221

“Humans – who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals have had an understandable penchant for pretending that animals do not feel pain. On whether we should grant some modicum of rights to other animals, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham stressed that the question was not how smart they are, but how much torment they can feel. [F]rom all criteria available to us – the recognizable agony in the cries of wounded animals, for example, including those who usually utter hardly a sound – this question seems moot. The limbic system in the human brain, known to be responsible for much of the richness of our emotional life, is prominent throughout the mammals. The same drugs that alleviate suffering in humans mitigate the cries and other signs of pain in many other animals. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer.”

— Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992), pp. 371-372

“Cannibalism is so repugnant to us that for years even anthropologists failed to admit that it was common in prehistory. It is easy to think: could other human beings really be capable of such a depraved act? But of course animal rights activists have a similarly low opinion of meat eaters, who not only cause millions of preventable deaths but do so with utter callousness: castrating and branding cattle without an anesthetic, impaling fish by the mouth and letting them suffocate in the hold of a boat, boiling lobsters alive. My point is not to make a moral case for vegetarianism but to shed light on the mindset of human violence and cruelty. History and ethnography suggest that people can treat strangers the way we now treat lobsters, and our incomprehension of such deeds may be compared with animal rights activists’ incomprehension of ours. It is no coincidence that Peter Singer, the author of The Expanding Circle, is also the author of Animal Liberation.”

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), p. 320

“I would not question the sincerity of vegetarians who take little interest in Animal Liberation because they give priority to other causes; but when nonvegetarians say that “human problems come first” I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.”

— Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“[T]he biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It’s not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings – the core of morality.

[The] power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-to-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people’s sentience becomes ludicrous. “Hath not a Jew eyes?” asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath nor a Jew – or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a god–a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.”

— Steven Pinker, The Mystery of Consciousness (Time, January 19, 2007)

“Why did I feed these animals against all advice? Because we live in the same place, because they were individuals, because they had relatives, experience, a past, and desires, because they were cold and hungry, because they hadn’t found enough to eat in the fall, because each had just one life.”

— Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

“You can’t imagine progressing towards a more altruistic society, a more compassionate society, while completely ignoring the suffering of animals.”

— Matthieu Ricard

“As long as humans think that animals don’t feel, animals have to feel that humans don’t think.”

— unknown

”Quite rightly, we do not normally take the behaviour of animals as a model for how we may treat them. We would not, for example, justify tearing a cat to pieces because we had observed the cat tearing a mouse to pieces. Carnivorous fishes don’t have a choice about whether to kill other fish or not. They kill as a matter of instinct. Meanwhile, humans can choose to abstain from killing or eating fish and other animals. Alternatively, the argument could be made that is part of natural order that there are predators and prey, and so it cannot be wrong for us to play our part in this order. But this ‘argument from nature’ can justify all kinds of inequities, including the rule of men over women and leaving the weak and the sick to fall by the wayside.”

— Peter Singer, The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter

“People who accuse us of putting in too much violence, [should see] what we leave on the cutting-room floor.”

— David Attenborough, speaking about his nature documentaries

“We slaughter 60 billion land animals each year, that’s 7 million every hour. Let’s imagine that mentioning this numbers was just a bad joke, and factory farming didn’t exist. Would you object [to] an increase in culinary diversity that required scientific experiments that killed 7 million animals per hour? How is factory farming different from that? Considering the victims, it seems that not helping to end factory farming is just as unethical as newly introducing it.”

— Michael Moor, Impact through rationality (TEDxZurich, 2013)

“Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer “immoral,” let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned.”

— John Stuart Mill, Whewell in Moral Philosophy

“Human beings are not the only creatures smart enough to suffer[.]”

— Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 449

“[A] full grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not ‘Can they reason?’ nor ‘Can they talk?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’”

— Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)

“The question [determining whether animals deserve ethical consideration] is not ‘Can they reason?’ nor ‘Can they talk?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’”

— Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)

“The racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own race, when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Similarly the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is the same in each case. [M]ost human beings are speciesists.”

— Peter Singer

“As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”

— Charles Darwin