April 3, 1949

A. C. Grayling (April 3 1949) is a philosopher who publicly, often, and gracefully, explicates the humanist viewpoint. His books include The Refutation of Scepticism (1985), as well as books on Bishop Berkely and Wittgenstein. The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt (2000) is another of his books, There are lots and I mean to read more of his writing; I have to find out how humanists think niceness suffices. 

Grayling taught at the University of London until 2011, and contributes to various publications regularly. He is a trustee of the London Library and has been a Booker Prize judge (2003.)

In a recent book Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age (2002) we find this quote:

The world divides into vegetarians and those that eat them....There are plenty who argue that it is not immoral to eat a cow, especially if it has lived well beforehand. Lovers of cats and dogs would think it cruel to eat their pets, though...[pets] have become quasi-citizens of the human world, and our treatment of them is premised on the same kind of concern for their interests as we show to other humans. We do not crowd dogs into a closed lorry as we do sheep when they are on a long export journeys; that is a happy fact. But it is an unhappy fact that we crowd sheep into lorries for sheep can suffer thirst and panic just as dogs - and humans- do.