How Vegetarians Observe the Golden Rule (1901)

AUTHOR: Moore, J. Howard

PUBLICATION: “How Vegetarians Observe the Golden Rule.” The Vegetarian and Our Fellow Creatures  Vol. XI (August 1901): 295-297.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015074773923&view=1up&seq=301

KEYWORDS: animals, animal welfare, food

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Moore explicitly promotes ethical veganism as an intersectional endeavor. He draws on evolutionary theory to explain why “the golden rule is not exemplified by the conduct of any considerable number of the inhabitants of the earth” (295). “Civilized men and women,” he writes, are but “reformed reptiles – troglodytes with a veneering of virtue” (295). Only evolution can account for this “provincialism of the civilized mind” (295). We need to understand that “the savage, as the original ancestor of mankind, has predetermined the general mental and temperamental makeup of all higher men” (295). He emphasizes the tribalism of the “ethics of the savage,” which does not distinguish between the “intrinsic natures” of acts so much as between “whether they are performed upon outsiders or upon insiders” (296). While these are indeed its origins, Moore also notes that such tribalism or “[e]thnocentric ethics […] has been manifested to a greater or less extent by the people of all times and of all degrees of enlightenment” (296). “More millions,” he notes, “are spent by the nations of the earth on war and missionaries than on anything else” (296). This is where vegetarianism comes in.

vegetarian is an animal who abstains from the suppression of other animals for nutritive purposes – a being who believes in observing the golden rule, in so far as a very imperfect world will allow, not to creatures of his own anatomy only, but to all creatures. Vegetarianism is the ethical corollary of evolution, and an important and inevitable aspect of modern humanitarianism. It is a protest against that system of philosophy which makes more than a million races of living being victims of the selfishness and ruffianism of a single race. 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 nation of human beings to the rest of the human world (297).

Unfortunately, “[n]onhuman millions are” still nothing but “outsiders” and “mere things” (297). As a result,

[t]hey may be set upon, beaten, maimed, starved, assassinated, eaten, insulted, deceived, imprisoned, robbed, tormented, skinned alive, shot down for pastime, cut to pieces out of curiosity, or compelled to undergo any other enormity or victimization anybody can think of or is disposed to visit upon them. They are of consequence only because they have backs and can carry burdens, and have thighs and can fill up the unoccupied places in the human alimentary (297).

Moore ends by noting the intersectional nature of vegetarianism, as it is but one aspect of a much more general “universal ethics.” Just like “the abolition movement, the revolution, and other movements, which have been put forth in history to humanize the world,” vegetarianism “is a protest against the traditional ethics of the jungle” (297).

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