Away with the fiction that human life has a value and sanctity all its own! It is a product of human conceit pure and simple. It has absolutely no fo… - J. Howard Moore
" "Away with the fiction that human life has a value and sanctity all its own! It is a product of human conceit pure and simple. It has absolutely no foundation in fact. Even humanitarians, many of them, are not more than a third emancipated from the anthropocentric notion, for they continue to make meals out of the very beings they preach kindness towards. Kreophagy is the most direct and terrible of all the forms of inhumanity. It is sustained solely by the weight of numbers, as were cannibalism and human slavery. It hasn't a single logical leg to stand on. Indeed, it is so intrinsically horrible that if meat-eaters were the exception instead of the rule, they would, it seems to me, be almost hunted from the earth, like lions and tigers and other despoilers of the Universe Beautiful.
About J. Howard Moore
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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Additional quotes by J. Howard Moore
Those things, thoughts, beings, acts, and instincts which help us to the pleasurable experiences of life we call good, and those which deprive us of pleasure or which bring upon us painful experiences we call bad. This is the supreme standard—Utility. Is the thing, thought, being, act, or impulse useful? Does it lead directly or indirectly to happiness and well-being? If it does, it is right, proper, and good. If it does not, it is wrong, improper, and bad.
The world we inhabit is not an ideal world, except to the ninny. It is not such a world as we would pick out if we were choosing, unless the assortment from which we were to make the selection were a pretty hard batch. It is so full of inconveniences in the first place—so much so that it seems sometimes that it must have been whittled out in some idle hour, without any idea that it would ever be used for anything, and then, when organic beings came into existence, it was given to them as a place to grow up and fight it out in, because there wasn't any other place for them to go. Then, again, it is inhabited by a lot of species that have acquired their natures through an apprenticeship of crime and militancy extending bade millions of years into the past.
Ideal cooperation is rational and intentional rather than accidental. The clumsy, unsystematic production of existing societies is replaced by perfectly symmetrical and unified procedures. The whole of society constitutes one mighty organism carrying on the functions necessary to its maintenance and welfare in the most intelligent and magnanimous manner. The social ideal is an organized fraternity of perfectly articulating supplements, assaulting the inanimate as an individual personality, not as a mob of incompatible ruffians.