Man has been so long accustomed to the undisputed privilege of spoliation, and has so long and so brilliantly imagined himself to be all there is in … - J. Howard Moore

These races of beings which man has associated with himself are living beings. They eat and drink and breathe, they suffer and enjoy, reproduce their kind and love their young, much as human beings do. They have been taken from their natural surroundings and forced to adopt ways of living that are often cruel, or even horrible. There is nothing much more certain than that men and women of the far future will recognize their kinship with these races, and will treat them in an entirely different way from what we do.

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.

The philosophies of this world have all been framed by, and from the standpoint of, a single species, and they are still managed and maintained in the interests of this species.