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Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

Book by Sarah Perry · 7 quotes · Wild Animal Suffering, Childhood, Children

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Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide Quotes

“I think it a valid hypothesis that poverty is actually dreadfully painful -not only physically, but emotionally and socially. There is only so much pain we can expect a being to endure before his attempts to relieve it through future-damaging means become perfectly understandable and, in fact, rational.”

Poverty
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“Children, now being very costly to raise, no longer provide a financial benefit to their parents. So children must instead provide meaning to make up for the missing material benefits. Having children is also, for the first time in human experience, genuinely a choice rather than a matter of course or providence. This choice must be justified, as it did not have to be in the past.”

Children
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“Children's freedom to roam and to socialize informally has been severely curtailed; their school environment has become more prisonlike, their physical safety protected at the expense of their education, development, and fun. The loss of children's freedom to roam may be regarded as an unfortunate late stage in the sacralization of childrearing.”

Childhood
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“Human morality, some may argue, applies only to human actions - not to the actions of animals. I agree with this. [...] However, morality must certainly apply to human inaction, and especially our inaction in preventing harm, suffering, and awfulness. What is the moral justification for the "hands off " dogma regarding nature? We often interfere with nature for the good of humans and human industry. Why not for the good of individual animals? Bloody Nature is a machine for pushing genes into the future. Does it really "know best"?”

Wild Animal Suffering
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“We don't even have to harm or kill animals in order to stop Nature from doing her evil deeds. We could simply prevent their reproduction, or even merely cease our current "conservation efforts" that involve breeding animals. Breeding wild animals and releasing them into the wild is doing the ugly work of Genesis all over again-and cruelly claiming that it's "good.”

Wild Animal Suffering
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