For moral reasons, animal rights are a major concern of mine.
Dogmatic Christians may claim that animals have no soul, but science has long established that while animals may differ from humans in their intellectual capacities, their emotional apparatus is remarkably similar. Any family that has pets is well aware of this.
The fact that the emotional apparatus of advanced animals is highly similar to that of humans means that they experience largely the same feelings, especially the negative sensations of pain and fear.
Nevertheless, animals are frequently subjected by humans to extreme cruelty. Who cares? Critics argue that certainly not those Catholic priests and certain human rights activists who, they claim, may project their own repressed sexual anxieties onto any sexual injustice they can detect.
They concern themselves with sexist remarks in public, the age at which sexually mature teenagers engage in sexual conduct, or the question of whether women who consciously enter the sex trade do so of their own free will, or whether such a choice is always the collective fault of men.
At the same time, these moral crusaders are often indifferent to the torture and gruesome killing of animals on an industrial scale reminiscent of historical atrocities.
They may claim that they do not want animals to suffer, but critics argue they share in the guilt of the animal cruelty industries because they direct so much of their moral energy toward lesser evils.
Moral responsibility is always proportional to what one knows about the world and the moral energy one possesses.
A person who would have run an anti-smoking campaign in a concentration camp while supporting the extermination of its inmates would be more offensive to the moral sense of a righteous observer than someone who simply did nothing.
Many Christian anti-sexual crusaders claim to feel sympathy for the sexually exploited, but critics contend that, in reality, they are merely hungry for the publicity they can attain in a media landscape that loves to publish sensationalized stories under the pretext of moral concern.
Critics argue that these crusaders and certain clergy lack genuine compassion because their focus is disproportionately fixated on sexual matters.