Russell of course lived his early life - he was already over forty in 1914 - at a time of complacent optimism about the unrestrained scope of human life on this planet, an optimism articulated equally, but from very different standpoints, by Engels, Ford and the early Wells, among many others. The 'frontier' was seen as something that could, indeed should, be pushed back ad infinitum.
We are now more or less painfully aware that Russell's moral precepts, even in the amended form above, become simply void if we foul and wreck our planetary nest. Our descendants cannot practise morality, or anything else, unless they are securely alive to do so. We might therefore feel bound to precede the values of truth, kindness and personal autonomy by asserting that "The good life is one that that cares for the long-term condition of this planet as our human home and is inspired by love . . . . autonomy of others".
Let us not be part of the chorus of facile disapproval (typically of others rather than of the members of the moralising chorus themselves) of our modern society. Give or take a blip or two, ours is, in many ways, a rather more moral society than much that preceded it. We no longer assume that it is right to found the economy upon racially based and cruelly enforced chattel slavery overseas and the gross exploitation of the vulnerable in horribly unsafe production processes in our own country; we no longer deem it right to inflict flogging, capital punishment or transportation for dozens of minor offences; we no longer accept open and gross corruption as the norm in politics; we no longer think it our duty to torture and slaughter those who are theologically at variance with ourselves. Whether this all-round rise in moral expectation and ethical practice is mostly because of a more liberal reading of the scriptures - or whether it can be attributed mostly to the outright secularisation of society - is a matter for discussion elsewhere. That there have been major changes for the better in the moral climate, in our few recent centuries, is hard to dispute.
Nowhere is this moral advance more evident than in our perceptions, and to some extent in our practices, in regard to the other animals. The current concern about transporting livestock, and the use of veal crates, would not only have been eccentric in the eighteenth century; it would have been unthinkable to the people to whom we owe basic knowledge of physiology - people who, for example, studied the circulation of the blood by dissecting unanaesthetised dogs nailed to the bench, by their feet, and whose vocal chords had been cut out to render the investigations less noisy. The then theologians assured people that, since animals have no souls, they suffer no pain so nobody need have qualms about horrendous vivisection experiments. 'If you can't stand the blood and guts then keep out of the lab' was the long and the short of it.
We are now kinder to animals - mostly. We now have some, albeit hesitant, respect for their autonomy, their feelings, their dignity. We even have some effective love for them, some sort of awareness that we ought sometimes to promote their best long term interests even against our short term ones. We are also learning the truth that we not only must use other species but that also we depend positively upon their well-being. We have a long way to go but we have started on an ethical exploration that most of our forebears could never even envisage.
The complex ethical question - and there are very few simple ethical questions - is ..... do some people stray into simplistic moral attitudes to other animals? Is there a naive sentimentality in the air to the effect that 'nature' is essentially harmonious and that humankind is the sole source of discord?
Nothing could be further from the truth than the idea of a warm cuddly Mother Nature; the animal world works on an all too well-founded fear of pain. Predators would soon eat their way to the starvation of their own species if the intended prey did not fear the pain of predation and try, with sufficient success, to escape and thus to breed and provide food for the next generation of predators. Without this pain/fear mechanism, evolution would have stopped at the vegetable stage - or, perhaps, at the herbivore stage. Were there no predation upon the herbivores, they would probably eat to extinction everything green in sight and soil erosion would do the rest.
What this pain/fear model does for the idea of a beneficent designer, we must leave to theologians to sort out but it does seem to be a large part of the way things are. If such a pain/fear model of the living world is even remotely tenable then rivalry between species is as much part of the scene as is harmony between species. In our attitude to other animals, we cannot absolutely 'contract out' of the cruelties of the living world; but we can, and should, moderate our contribution to the general mayhem and anyone who thinks we can simply opt out of it is . . . . simply mistaken.
Regarding other animal species, two branches of the kindly conscientious humane tendency seem to me to exemplify simplistic moralising quite as much as effective ethical endeavour. Both are to be taken seriously as exemplars of noble aspiration; neither can credibly be taken as identifying absolute moral truth.
Vegetarians - who will not kill animals for the use of animal products - are willing to consume products that do not entail killing, directly. They will eat eggs and dairy produce; they will not eat flesh. They will wear wool or silk; they will not use leather. Vegans eschew animal products altogether and a vegan correspondent to The Scotsman recently played what he thought was the ace of trumps. What, he wondered, would vegetarians have us do with bull calves? His point was that to get milk you need calving and half the calves are male and almost all of these are surplus to the requirements of future calving. That was his vegan challenge to the vegetarians.
Possible solutions to this problem come to mind; we might kill the bull calves - in which case, why not rear them humanely and then kill them for food. An animal being killed does not presumably worry whether the killer's next step is to eat the corpse or to compost it, to bury it or to cremate it. Alternatively, the bull calves might be allowed to live out their natural lives - early retirement from birth seems to be very attractive (and not only to bull calves). Such benevolence would put up the price of dairy products to unacceptable levels and would entail the use of land and food resources surely beyond the call of humane duty. Since we Greens accept a duty to conserve resources, such a practice would not only be imprudent - it would be immoral. Similar observations might be made on the subject of old cows, cock chicks and old hens. The vegan's point seems to have been well made.
But the vegan suffers from the well known mote/beam ailment if he is absolutely against killing animals for the production of human necessities. We could cover every available inch of land with nutritious human food crops - and if we did that we would, almost at a stroke, increase the rabbit population (to name only one of our natural competitors). We would either have to accept poor net yields of food crops - and consequent high prices for food - or we would have to kill the rabbits. If we do that, then in what way does it harm them if we eat them?
There are no credible moral absolutes in our dealings with other animals. There can be a crude scale of ethical 'points' along such lines as the following. Top marks can be scored for killing painlessly an animal in irreversible terminal pain or impairment. Some points can be scored for rearing and using animals with ever-increasing attention to their feelings, their perceived dignity. Little credit can be had for using any methods of pest control that entail avoidable suffering by animals. The use of such things as the eyes of living rabbits to test cosmetics for user friendliness is pretty well down the list and nothing but odium can be attached to killing animals for fun - even if you do it in fancy dress and can claim, incidentally, to achieve some ecological gain. To set animals to fight one another to please sadistic gamblers is surely at the the very bottom of the scale. Even the worst vivesection for research purposes is somewhat less objectionable than organised dog fights.
All we can do usefully is to push our practices towards the top of some such ethical scale - on the basis of demonstrable fact and valid logic. The warmth generated by self-indulgent pretensions to moral absolutes is cold comfort for suffering animals in practice.