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Pain and suffering are in themselves bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the being that suffers. how bad a pain is depends on how intense it is and how long it lasts, but pain of the same intensity and duration are equally bad, whether felt by humans or animals.
-Peter Singer
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Pain And Suffering Are In Themselves Bad

Peter Singer
Pain and suffering are in themselves bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the being that suffers. how bad a pain is depends on how intense it is and how long it lasts, but pain of the same intensity and duration are equally bad, whether felt by humans or animals.
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Sex Pain Animal

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Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. a sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. it is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. the behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. they are just too much like us.
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It must be stressed that there is nothing insulting about looking at people as animals. we are animals, after all. homo sapiens is a species of primate, a biological phenomenon dominated by biological rules, like any other species. human nature is no more than one particular kind of animal nature. agreed, the human species is an extraordinary animal; but all other species are also extraordinary animals, each in their own way, and the scientific man-watcher can bring many fresh insights to the study of human affairs if he can retain this basic attitude of evolutionary humility.
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So far as this argument is concerned nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhuman animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis can we do it, other than a bare-faced - and morally indefensible - preference for members of our own species?
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This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. heraclitus said it: panta rhei. all flows, nothing lasts. not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in saint-tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. to the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. it’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.
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If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. no matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering - insofar as rough comparisons can be made - of any other being. so the limit of sentience is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. to mark this boundary by some other characteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in an arbitrary manner. why not choose some other characteristic, like skin color?
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