Status Updates From The Essential Mary Midgley

"Inequalities above one’s own level tend to be visible: those below it to be hidden."
"nineteenth-century women, struggling against odds for the right to education and interesting work, took for granted the cheap labour of uneducated female servants."
"at Athens [...] they forged and defended [...] equality before the law while their women were all incarcerated in harems and their daily labour done by slaves."

"[Kant] says that it is only because cruelty to animals may lead on to cruelty to humans, or degrade us, or be a sign of a bad moral character, that we have to avoid it. This means that if we can show that [e.g.] venting our ill-temper on the dog will prevent our doing it on our families,[...] dog-bashing, properly managed, could count as a legitimate form of therapy, along with gardening, pottery and raffia-work."

"All argument involves trying to change feelings, because all belief involves feeling. Even a scientist or historian, if he thinks a colleague is making a mistake, can quite properly try to rouse his suspicions on the matter, to make him unhappy about the error, to weaken his confidence in it, to rouse his curiosity about an alternative suggestion and eventually to induce a confident acceptance of it."

"the chief difficulty about accepting continuity between man and other species, or between the human intellect and the rest of man, now comes not from traditional religion[...]
[People] do not realize how many of the difficulties raised by religion they are needlessly keeping while officially jettisoning its metaphysics. Reverence for humanity [...] slips across into overtly religious form[...]
‘worship of humanity’"

"The use of words like brutal, bestial, beastly shows how readily we [connect the notion of vice with other species]. [Primitive man] is not without natural inhibitions, but his inhibitions are weak. He does horrible things and is filled with remorse afterwards. These conflicts are pre-rational [...]. They are not the result of thinking; more likely they are among the things that first made him think."