We never take the time to put ourselves in the places of our victims. We never take the trouble to get over into their world, and realise what is happening over there as a result of our doings toward them. It is so much more comfortable not to do so—so much more comfortable to be blind and deaf and insane.
"The Psychology of Altruism", p. 304
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship
“The denial by human animals of ethical relations to the rest of the animal world is a phenomenon not differing either in character or cause from the denial of ethical relations by a tribe, people, or race of human beings to the rest of the human world. The provincialism of Jews toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks, of Romans toward non-Romans, of Moslems toward non-Moslems, and of Caucasians toward non-Caucasians, is not one thing and the provincialism of human beings toward non -human beings another. They are all manifestations of the same thing. The fact that these various acts are performed by different individuals and upon different individuals, and are performed at different times and places, does not invalidate the essential sameness of their natures. Crimes are not classified (except by savages or their immediate derivatives) according to the similarity of those who do them or those who suffer from them, but by grouping them according to the similarity of their intrinsic qualities. All acts of provincialism consist essentially in the disinclination or inability to be universal, and they belong in reality, all of them, to the same species of conduct.”
"The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings", p. 276
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship
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J. Howard Moore 183
1862–1916Related quotes
Source: The Animal Welfare Movement and the Foundations of Ethics, p. 95
Gautama Buddha, Udana 10
Unclassified
"The Bull-Fight" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)
Alternate translation: Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.
Ни одна наша смертная мерка не годится для суждения о небытии, о том, что не есть человек.
Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, p. 119
Pillars of Globalization, p. 13 (2006)
trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 90
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)
"Nihilism On A Religious Soil" (6 May 1907) http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1907_135_4.html
Context: The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority.