Best 257 quotes of Peter Singer on MyQuotes

Peter Singer

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    Peter Singer

    According to classical utilitarianism, the only intrinsic good is happiness; the only intrinsic bad is pain. That implies no intrinsic value in preserving nature, that preserving an endangered plant is valuable only if it benefits humans or other animals. Intuitively, that seems wrong but perhaps I shouldn't trust my intuition here.

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    Peter Singer

    According to the Dominant Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings.

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    Peter Singer

    After 9/11, the American Red Cross received more than half a billion dollars in donations to help the victims of the terrorist attacks. The families of the victims were already well-provided for by various government funds, so Red Cross simply drew a line across lower Manhattan and offered everyone there financial assistance, whether they needed it or not.

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    Peter Singer

    All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals.

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    Peter Singer

    All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.

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    Peter Singer

    An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would be justifiable.

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    Peter Singer

    Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.

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    Peter Singer

    As for cages themselves, an ordinary citizen who kept dogs in similar conditions for their entire lives would risk prosecution for cruelty. A pig producer who keeps an animal of comparable intelligence in this manner, however, is more likely to be rewarded with a tax concession or, in some countries, a direct government subsidy.

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    Peter Singer

    As we realize that more and more things have global impact, I think we're going to get people increasingly wanting to get away from a purely national interest.

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    Peter Singer

    At present scientists do not look for alternatives simply because they do not care enough about the animals they are using.

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    Peter Singer

    At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.

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    Peter Singer

    Becoming a vegan is a sure way of completely avoiding participation in the abuse of farmed animals. Vegans are a living demonstration of the fact that we do not need to exploit animals for food.

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    Peter Singer

    Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

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    Peter Singer

    Bush sees the evil as out there in the wider world, residing in people who 'hate freedom'. Look at his immediate response to the pictures of prisoner abuse; this is not what Americans do, these are not our values.

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    Peter Singer

    Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing.

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    Peter Singer

    But I think the majority of cows, and even more so chickens and pigs, are leading pretty miserable lives.

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    Peter Singer

    Can we really believe that we are living a good life, an ethically decent life if we don't do anything serious to help reduce poverty around the world and help save the lives of children or adults who are likely to die if we don't increase the amount of aid we are giving.

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    Peter Singer

    Capitalism is very far from a perfect system, but so far we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy. If we ever do find a better system, I'll be happy to call myself an anti-capitalist.

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    Peter Singer

    Charitable giving is a huge sector in the United States. It amounts to $350 billion a year. And yet, I can't help feeling that a lot of that is wasted because people have not been thinking about how to do it as effectively as possible.

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    Peter Singer

    Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper.

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    Peter Singer

    ...chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are thinking, self-aware beings, capable of planning ahead, who form lasting social bonds with others and have a rich social and emotional life. The great apes are therefore an ideal case for showing the arbitrariness of the species boundary. If we think that all human beings, irrespective of age or mental capacity, have some basic rights, how can we deny that the great apes, who surpass some humans in their capacities, also have these rights?

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    Peter Singer

    Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.

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    Peter Singer

    Do business managers have a commitment to anything more than the success of their company and to making money? It would be hard to say that they do. Indeed, many business leaders deny that there is any conflict between self-interest and the interests of all.

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    Peter Singer

    Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need. You could take the money you're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization the Against Malaria Foundation which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets to protect children. And we know reliably that if we provide nets, they're used, and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria. Fortunately more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement effective altruism.

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    Peter Singer

    Effective altruism is the form of altruism in which we bring our rational capacities to bear in order to do the most good that we can.

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    Peter Singer

    Egoism... is not eliminated by economic reorganization or by material abundance. When basic needs are satisfied, new 'needs' emerge. In our society, people want no simply clothes, but fashionable clothes; not shelter, but a house to display their wealth and taste.

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    Peter Singer

    Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations about honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by sex.)

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    Peter Singer

    Even people who are aware that the traditional family farm has been taken over by big business interests, and that some questionable experiments go on in laboratories, cling to a vague belief that conditions cannot be too bad, or else the government or the animal welfare societies would have done something about it.

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    Peter Singer

    Every day we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements.

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    Peter Singer

    Every profession will have its rogues, of course, no matter what oaths are sworn, but many health care professionals have a real commitment to serving the best interests of their clients.

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    Peter Singer

    Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.

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    Peter Singer

    Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers

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    Peter Singer

    For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them.... The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment.

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    Peter Singer

    Grain that is used to feed animals that end up on our tables as turkeys and hams could have gone to feed starving people.

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    Peter Singer

    Habits of thought lead us to brush aside descriptions of cruelty to animals as emotional, for "animal-lovers only"; or if not that, then anyway the problem is so trivial in comparison to the problems of human beings that no sensible person could give it time and attention. This too is a prejudice - for how can one know that a problem is trivial until one has taken the time to examine its extent?

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    Peter Singer

    Had Rumsfeld said at any time 'get me a report on what's going on', he could have had it. You're right, it depends on choices that we make, which parts of the world we want to be in immediate contact with.

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    Peter Singer

    History is not going to look kindly on us if we just keep our head in the sand on armed autonomous robotics issue because it sounds too science fiction.

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    Peter Singer

    Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.

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    Peter Singer

    Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning.

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    Peter Singer

    Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.

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    Peter Singer

    I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it's clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.

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    Peter Singer

    I believe that in this new world that we live in, we often have a responsibility, you know, to actually go beyond the thou shalt nots - that is, the not harming others - and say we can help others and we should be helping others.

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    Peter Singer

    I believe that nationalism is a very strong force, but there are other forces operating; there are tendencies pushing towards a larger picture, especially in Europe, I think; but I still think nationalism is real.

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    Peter Singer

    I can tell you that too much money is corrupting American politics. Don't blame the American public. The U.S. Supreme Court has a lot to answer for, because it has made it impossible for Congress to reduce the corrupting influence of money on American political life.

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    Peter Singer

    I'd much rather be part of a society which greatly honors and respects people who are altruists and who are effective in their altruism, than one that either admires people because they're, you know, celebrity movie stars or because they're super wealthy just no matter what they do with their wealth because I think we ought to try to encourage more people to act in that way.

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    Peter Singer

    I do not believe that it could never be justifiable to experiment on a brain-damaged human.

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    Peter Singer

    I don't think nationalism is alone holding the field; it's in contention with a lot of different things.

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    Peter Singer

    I don't think there's anything in the compromise that means that there's a clash of ethics.

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    Peter Singer

    I don't think there's much point in bemoaning the state of the world unless there's some way you can think of to improve it. Otherwise, don't bother writing a book; go and find a tropical island and lie in the sun.

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    Peter Singer

    I don't understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It's a pretty gross interference with nature. I think it ought to be governed by the standards of how it affects the individual animals, just as we'd want to deal with institutions that deal with humans by how they affect individual humans.