Dinesh's photos with the keyword: The Moral Animal

John Stuart Mill: “If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. . . If Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of a perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man.” socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/mill/utilitarianism.pdf

Herbert Spencer is considered (in some ways unfairly) the classic proponent of social Darwinism, which justifies cruelty and oppression on grounds that suffering is evolution’s path of “progress.”

Thomas Henry Huxley: “The practice of that which is ethically best -- what we call goodness or virtue -- involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads fo success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint, in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much of the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive.”

Samuel Smiles, author of the 1859 book Self-Help: “The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil is, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.” www.gutenberg.org/files/935/935-h/935-h.htm

”Charles Darwin around 1882: “As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies of all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races”