“Autonomy means acting on reasons I have chosen; but the lesson of cognitive science is that there is no self to do the choosing. We are far more like machines and wild animals than we imagine. But we cannot attain the amoral selflessness of wild animals, or the choiceless automatism of machines. Perhaps we can learn to live more lightly, less burdened by morality. We cannot return to a purely spontaneous existence. If humans differ from other animals, it is partly in the conflicts of their instincts. They crave security, but they are easily bored; they are peace-loving animals, but they have an itch for violence; they are drawn to thinking, but at the same time they hate and fear the unsettlement thinking brings. There is no way of life in which all these needs can be satisfied. Luckily, as the history of philosophy testifies, humans have a gift for self-deception, and thrive in ignorance of their natures.”

— John Gray, book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Vices of Morality: Animal virtues (p. 115-6)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

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British philosopher 1948

Jeff McMahan (philosopher) (1954) American philosopher

" The Meat Eaters http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/", The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2010

“We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the imagination.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Memoirs of My Dead Life http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8mmdl10.txt (1906), Ch. 6: Spent Loves.

“We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness, we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Darwin Among the Machines
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part III - The Germs of Erewhon and of Life and Habit

“I want to be spontaneous like a wild animal”

Giovanni Morassutti (1980) Italian actor, theatre director and cultural entrepreneur.

“Humans are currently the dominant species on earth and exercise a great deal of power and control over nature. But very few believe might makes right, so the fact that we have greater power cannot enter into a justification of our use and treatment of animals. Rather, where other beings are under our power, we should feel obligated to show self-restraint and to act out of mercy and compassion. We cannot avoid causing harm to other beings in the process of living our own lives. Nor does morality consist in trying to be perfect and pure. But we can adopt an orientation toward minimizing the amount of harm we cause and taking full responsibility for it, seeing it for what it is. To justify animal experimentation is to start at one end of a continuum. Much of what we do will be morally acceptable (in our eyes), and we will chip away at the extremity where what we do shades into cruelty. I no longer believe that a general moral justification of animal experimentation can be given.”

Michael Allen Fox (1940)

" Animal Experimentation: A Philosopher's Changing Views https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1609&context=bts" (1987), in Between the Species, vol. 3, iss. 2, p. 59.

“No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.”

Karen Blixen book Out of Africa

Source: Out of Africa

“Feelings can be like wild animals-we underrate how fierce they are until we've opened their cage”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Sunflower

“The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 1. Why Are People?

“Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

As It Is: Simply To See (p.199)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.”

José Saramago book Blindness

Se não formos capazes de viver inteiramente como pessoas, ao menos façamos tudo para não viver inteiramente como animais.
Source: Blindness (1995), p. 116

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