A Quote by Torbjorn Tannsjo
There are some particular moral truths that I believe we have access to (such as the one not to inflict pain on a sentient being for no reason).
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It is true (independently of our conceptualisation) that it is wrong to inflict pain on a sentient creature for no reason (she doesn't deserve it, I haven't promised to do it, it is not helpful to this creature or to anyone else if I do it, and so forth). But if this is a truth, existing independently of our conceptualisation, then at least one moral fact (this one) exists and moral realism is true. We have to accept this, I submit, unless we can find strong reasons to think otherwise.
Lack of understanding of the true nature of happiness, it seems to me, is the principal reason why people inflict sufferings on others. They think either that the other's pain may somehow be a cause of happiness for themselves or that their own happiness is more important, regardless of what pain it may cause. But this is shortsighted. No one truly benefits from causing harm to another sentient being. . . . . In the long run causing others misery and infringing their rights to peace and happiness result in anxiety, fear, and suspicion within oneself.
Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal.
Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.
Where there is a mind, there are feelings such as pain, pleasure, and joy. No sentient being wants pain: all wants happiness instead.
The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution.
If it takes several billion years to develop the building blocks which you need, like RNA and DNA, and then those can build multicellular life and then multicellular life can be honed with natural selection to a point where it becomes sentient like us, then at some point that sentient being can begin to manipulate the matter around it to build better sentient life.
But what after all, behind appearances, is this seeming mystery? We can see that it is the Consciousness which had lost itself returning again to itself, emerging out of its giant self-forgetfulness, slowly, painfully, as a Life that is would be sentient, half-sentient, dimly sentient, wholly sentient and finally struggles to be more than sentient, to be again divinely selfconscious, free, infinite, immortal.
Even today I cannot believe that people who lived together could inflict horrible pain on each other.
I believe we are the only sentient beings in the universe, and I believe that 500 years from now, we will still be the only sentient beings around.
Being vegan is not just a matter of being 'kind' to animals. First and foremost, it is a matter of being just and observing our moral obligation to not treat other sentient beings as things.
Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?
There is no logical basis to support the theory that plants feel pain. The dubious possibility that they might, however, is no justification for killing obviously sentient beings. Any rational person understands the striking difference between slitting the throat of a sentient animal and plucking a fruit or a vegetable.
Being in church so often, spending those hours sitting in front of a highly symbolic array of objects, hearing those beautiful texts - it teaches a kid that there are important truths beyond the literal ones, and that we have ways to access those truths that are, let's say, super-rational.
The main point for me is moral; animals are sentient beings. I know for some this is a hard argument to accept, but we're not built to eat a lot of meat.
There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.
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