The following is an excerpt from Empty Cages by Tom Regan People of a religious bent, especially Christians who take the Bible seriously, often agree that rights are not the moral currency of their faith-based ethic. You just don’t find moral rights in the Bible. What you do find, very unambiguously, is that God gives [...]
Whence does morality emanate? Is the source celestial or merely mundane? Or, are definitions of right and wrong simply a matter of individual conscience, with each person free to pursue his own course? These questions have engaged the finest philosophical minds (including eminent theologians) that ever were. For many, sacred texts (the Bible for Judeo-Christian [...]
Patterns of domination and subjugation, and hierarchical ideas about species, are indeed deeply ingrained in human thinking. If we say it’s not possible to change ourselves, whether we’re right or wrong, by saying so we thereby perpetuate the power structures humanity has constructed. The first step to achieving change is conceiving it, and that’s what [...]
“[W]as there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the only natural, condition of [...]