“I had no idea we planned to be so ruthless.""It was not publicized or even discussed with the political arm of the colonization program. Ruthlessness was necessary but wins no votes.""But this is not our world, to treat however we want!""Visiting here as students of an alien evolutionary tradition would not be either cost-effective or, ultimately, successful. We would inevitably contaminate Garden, or worse yet, become contaminated and bring potentially deadly Gardenian life forms back to Earth. The three continental preserves will be sufficient to allow biologists to study alien life at some point in the future. And if you really thought we would colonize this world without making it 'ours', you'd be far too naive to command this expedition.""I...didn't realize...""You didn't think about it at all," said the expendable. "The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species' most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.""And you aren't morally blind?""We see the moral ironies very clearly. We simply don't care.”

“The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species' most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.”

“We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence.”

“We tell ourselves how lovely it would be, would it not, if there were a God who created the universe and benign Providence, a moral world order, and life beyond the grave, yet it is very evident, is it not, that all of this is the way we should inevitably wish it to be. And it would be even more remarkable if our poor, ignorant bondsman ancestors had managed to solve all these difficult cosmic questions.”

“Cultural speciation had been crippling to human moral and spiritual growth. It had hindered freedom of thought, limited our thinking, imprisoned us in the cultures into which we had been born. . . . These cultural mind prisons. . . . Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the ‘global village’ we would propagate prejudice and ignorance.”

“If we take the position that an assessment that veganism is morally preferable to vegetarianism is not possible because we are all “on our own journey,” then moral assessment becomes completely impossible or is speciesist. It is impossible because if we are all “on our own journey,” then there is nothing to say to the racist, sexist, anti-semite, homophobe, etc. If we say that those forms of discrimination are morally bad, but, with respect to animals, we are all “on our own journey” and we cannot make moral assessments about, for instance, dairy consumption, then we are simply being speciesist and not applying the same moral analysis to nonhumans that we apply to the human context.”