Anthropocentrism

Locke condemns cruelty to animals because tormenting them can harden children and make them more likely to be cruel to other people. The prohibition belongs to a view in which animals are given for human use, within the limits of natural law. The reason explicitly given is therefore indirect: it aims to preserve human compassion rather than grounding the prohibition in any recognised worth of the animal itself.

Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §116 · Second Treatise of Government, §26

Marcus Aurelius grounds the universal moral and political community in the reason humans share: if intelligence is common to us, so is law, and the world is like a city. He sharply distinguishes relations with rational beings, which belong to social life, from the use of animals and things, for which he asks only magnanimity and liberality. This prescribed gentleness does not make animal sentience the ground of moral worth.

Meditations, IV, 4 · Meditations, VI, 23

Seneca distinguishes the impulses of animals from passions proper to humans, which require reason's assent: an animal has neither anger nor virtue in the strict sense. Yet he reports the reasons Sotion taught him for abstaining from meat, among them the fear of habituating humans to cruelty, and says he kept that diet for a year before dropping it on his father's advice, amid suspicion of foreign cults. The account shows moral reflection on diet, not a doctrine making animal sentience the ground of moral standing.

On Anger, I, 3 · Letters to Lucilius, 108, 17-22

When the stables burned, the Master asked whether anyone was hurt, and did not ask about the horses: on the traditional reading, care for persons comes before all else. The Analects locate ren primarily in human relationships: the disciple Youzi names filial piety and respect for one's elders as the root of its practice. That priority does not rule out restraint toward animals: the Master fished with a line, not a net, and did not shoot at roosting birds.

Analects, X (the stable fire; numbering varies across editions) · Analects, I, 2; VII, 27

Hume credits animals with learning and with reasoning from experience, and grants them the gentle treatment that the "laws of humanity" prescribe. Yet he separates these duties of humane treatment from the obligations of justice: imagining rational creatures entirely incapable of resisting us, he grants them humane treatment without placing them under the protection of justice. Their inability to constrain us, rather than any lack of sentience, explains that exclusion. Benevolence thus reaches beyond the human species without extending to equal consideration for all sentient beings.

A Treatise of Human Nature, I, III, 16 · An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, III, 1

At first Deckard kills, on orders, beings who are afraid and who suffer, without asking what he owes them: in practice, in his line of work, only humans count. Spoiler His acts move him toward pathocentrism without his reaching it: his concern goes first to one particular replicant and to the one who spared him, not to every being that can suffer. His early remarks, inferred here rather than stated as a principle, placed him on the opposite side.

The pursuit of Zhora · The rooftop · The final scene