The idea that we have the right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the trivial reasons of palate pleasure and fashion is, without doubt, one of the most arrogant and morally repugnant notions in the history of human thought.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes the ethical implications of causing harm to sentient beings for superficial reasons.
Gary L. Francione's quote challenges the moral justification for using animals for food and fashion, emphasizing that it is an arrogant and morally reprehensible position to prioritize personal enjoyment above the suffering of sentient beings. This perspective urges individuals to reconsider their choices and the ethical consequences that come with them, advocating for a deeper respect for all life.
In practice
In a debate on animal rights, one could use this quote to emphasize the moral implications of traditional practices.
Humans treat animals as things that exist as means to human ends. That's morally wrong. Sexism promotes the idea that women are things that exist as means to the ends of men. That's morally wrong. We need to stop treating all persons - whether human or nonhuman - as things.
They are nonhuman persons. They are not food. If animals matter morally at all, there is one and only one rational response: go vegan. Everything else is just participation in animal exploitation.
We cannot talk simultaneously about animal rights and the 'humane' slaughter of animals.
We are vegans not simply because being vegan will reduce suffering. We are vegan because every sentient being values her or his life even if no one else does. We are vegan because justice minimally requires that we not take life for trivial purposes.
We can no more justify using nonhumans as human resources than we can justify human slavery. Animal use and slavery have at least one important point in common: both institutions treat sentient beings exclusively as resources of others. That cannot be justified with respect to humans; it cannot be justified with respect to nonhumans—however “humanely” we treat them.
Veganism is the application of the principle of abolition in your own life; it represents your recognition that animals are not things. Veganism is the recognition of the moral personhood of nonhuman animals.
This is the 21st-century paradox: Even as political democracy has become the intellectual default mode for much of the world, the private sector usually trumps the public one when it comes to accommodating consumer choice.
Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.
When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!
and god help you if you are an ugly girl course too pretty is also your doom cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room and god help you if you are a pheonix and you dare to rise up from the ash a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy while you are just flying back
The early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles o popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.
I don’t think we can solve the outside problems until we solve the ones within.
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