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"Our first moral concern should always be with the individual who is the maximum sufferer."
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Richard D. RyderWhat we should be concerned about is the happiness of individuals. App — Richard D. Ryder
"What we should be concerned about is the happiness of individuals. Applying rights may be a rough and ready rule of thumb for doing this, but painism would be a far more accurate approach. It might require more detailed research into the consequences of policies on individuals but that, in principle, could be done. Indeed, to base public policy upon scientific findings would be a considerable step forward."
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Richard D. Ryder
Richard D. Ryder
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Richard Hood Jack Dudley Ryder is an English writer, psychologist, and animal rights advocate. Ryder became known in the 1970s as a member of the Oxford Group, a group of intellectuals loosely centred on the University of Oxford who began to speak out against animal use, in particular factory farming and animal research. He was working at the time as a clinical psychologist at the Warneford Hospit
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"The 1960s revolutions against racism, sexism and classism nearly missed out the animals. This worried me. Ethics and politics at the time simply overlooked the nonhumans entirely. Everyone seemed to be just preoccupied with reducing the prejudices against humans. Hadn’t they heard of Darwin? I hated racism, sexism and classism, too, but why stop there? As a hospital scientist I believed that hundreds of other species of animals suffer fear, pain and distress much as I did. Something had to be done about it. We needed to draw the parallel between the plight of the other species and our own. One day in 1970, lying in my bath at the old Sunningwell Manor, near Oxford, it suddenly came to me: SPECIESISM!"
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Richard D. RyderQuote
"It is always wrong to cause pain to A merely in order to increase the pleasure of B."
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Richard D. RyderQuote
"Perhaps there is too much talk of justice, equality and liberty in political philosophy, and not enough about suffering. It is suffering that matters morally …"
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Richard D. RyderQuote
"Their experiences may be more simple than ours, but are they less intense? Perhaps a caterpillar’s primitive pain when squashed is greater than our more sophisticated sufferings."
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Richard D. RyderQuote
"Consciousness is of paramount importance to all of us. By definition it is the universe of our awareness. On the assumption that many other species are conscious or sentient I have suggested that our morality is based upon a concern for all sentients-which I have called sentientism, although I could equally have called it consciousism (but that is even more horrible as a word!). Pain and pleasure are the two great poles of consciousness, between which all sentients swing ... ."
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Richard D. Ryder