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" "The question is not. Shall man be master of the earth? but. What sort of a master shall he be? Shall he be cruel and selfish, bigoted and imperialistic, thinking only of himself and sacrificing the interests of others to his own heartless purposes? or shall he be the responsible administrator of the universe, presiding over the affairs of the earth honourably and equitably, with a mind single to the good of all? Shall he be a savage despot or a schoolmaster? a feared and hated monster, or a wise, patient, and affectionate father? Since he has become the manager of the planet, shall he manage it as he would wish it to be managed if he were a subordinate and some other race had succeeded to the superintendency, or shall he cut loose from all moral obligations, ignore the promptings of his better self, and run things absolutely in the interest of himself? Which shall it be—the great law of love or the savage law of might?
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 of "Universal Kinship", based on the shared evolutionary kinship between all sentient beings.
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Man is but a single sector in the great circle of sentient life. The human species is one among a million or two of species inhabiting the earth. The beings below and around us have had the same origin as we have. They have the same general architecture of both body and mind, and are footballed by the same antithetical impulses of pleasure and pain. Whatever the beings of this world have been in the past, they can never again be anything but a family. Universal ethics is a corollary of universal kinship. Moral obligation is as boundless as feeling.
[W]e are a part of Nature, we human beings, just as truly a part of the universe of things as the insect or the sea. And are we not as much entitled to be considered in the selection of a model as the part 'red in tooth and claw'? At the feet of the tiger is a good place to study the dentition of the cat family, but it is a poor place to learn ethics.