Peter Singer Quotes (54 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews - Richard Dawkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYNY2oKVWU, 2009. Source: Practical Ethics Context: Speciesism is an attitude of prejudice towards beings because they're not members of our species, so just as racism means that you're prejudiced against beings who are not members of your race and sexism means you're prejudiced against people of the other sex. So we humans tend to be speciesist in we think that any being that is a member of the species homo sapien just automatically has a higher moral status and is more important than any being that is a member of any other species, irrespective of the actual characteristics of those beings.

“Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation

“Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty

“The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation

“The only justifiable stopping place for for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 4, Reason, p. 120

“How far down the evolutionary scale shall we go? Shall we eat fish? What about shrimps? Oysters? To answer these questions we must bear in mind the central principle on which our concern for other beings is based. As I said … the only legitimate boundary to our concern for the interests of other beings is the point at which it is no longer accurate to say that the other being has interests. To have interests, in a strict, nonmetaphorical sense, a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being. But the converse of this is also true. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of enjoyment, there is nothing to take into account.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian

“When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called "supererogatory"”

Peter Singer

an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so. Famine, Affluence, and Morality http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972----.htm, 1972.

“There may have been times when I wondered if there might be a God, but it always seemed to me wildly implausible that a God worth worshipping could allow the Holocaust to occur.”

Peter Singer

Interview with the Jewish Chronicle https://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/interviews/peter-singer-is-he-really-the-most-dangerous-man-in-the-world-1.34980, Dan Goldberg, 16 August, 2012.

“Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 3, From Evolution To Ethics?, p. 61

“We are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we could have prevented.”

Peter Singer

Introduction (p. xv)
Writings on an Ethical Life (2000)

“Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 5, Reason And Genes, p. 145

“Speciesism—the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term—is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 1: All Animals Are Equal

“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.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 172

“There can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 4, Reason, p. 119

“The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 2, The Biological Basis Of Ethics, p. 27

“It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.”

Peter Singer

Preface To The 2011 edition, p. xi
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)

“It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values that we hold.”

Peter Singer book Practical Ethics

Source: Practical Ethics, 3rd Edition (2011), Ch. 3: Equality for Animals? (p. 49)

“The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 4, Reason, p. 88

“Ethics seems a morass which we have to cross, but get hopelessly bogged in when we make the attempt.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 167

“The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 157

“If evolution is a struggle for survival, why hasn't it ruthlessly eliminated altruists, who seem to increase another's prospects of survival at the cost of their own?”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 1, The Origins Of Altruism, p. 5

“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.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 4, Reason, p. 88

“[One thing] underpins, makes consistent, and gives meaning to all our other activities on behalf of animals. This one thing is that we take responsibility for our own lives, and make them as free of cruelty as we can. The first step is that we cease to eat animals. Many people who are opposed to cruelty to animals draw the line at becoming a vegetarian. It was of such people that Oliver Goldsmith, the eighteenth-century humanitarian essayist, wrote: "They pity, and they eat the objects of their compassion."”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian

“Everyday we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 3, From Evolution To Ethics?, p. 69

“When my ability to reason shows me that the suffering of another being is very similar to my own suffering and matters just as much to that other being as my own suffering matters to me, then my reason is showing me something that is undeniably true…. The perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile in a way that is independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found.”

Peter Singer

p. 238 http://books.google.com/books?id=BoDMBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT238 Writings on an Ethical Life (2000)

“Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.”

Peter Singer

Afterword To The 2011 Edition, p. 187
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)

“To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian

“To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed… It's had effects around the margins, of course, but they have mostly been minor. When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time the sixties still existed for us. It looked as if real changes were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one of them. All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald's to see how successful I have been.”

Peter Singer

Quoted by Michael Specter on the impact of the book Animal Liberation, " The Dangerous Philosopher http://www.michaelspecter.com/1999/09/the-dangerous-philosopher/", The New Yorker, 6 September 1999.

“Ethics is inescapable.”

Peter Singer

Preface, p. xv
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)

Peter Singer

... The perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile in a way that is independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found. p. 238 http://books.google.com/books?id=BoDMBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT238 Writings on an Ethical Life (2000)

“One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today’s factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy.”

Peter Singer book The Most Good You Can Do

Source: The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (2015), Chapter 15: Preventing Human Extinction (p. 177)

“We do not have to make self- sacrifice a necessary element of altruism. We can regard people as altruists because of the kind of interests they have rather than because they are sacrificing their interests.”

Peter Singer book The Most Good You Can Do

Source: The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (2015), Chapter 9: Altruism and Happiness (p. 103)

“Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.”

Peter Singer book The Most Good You Can Do

Preface (p. vii)
The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (2015)

“The fact that no one has come up with a really convincing reason for giving greater moral weight to members of our own species, simply because they are members of our species, strongly suggests that there is no such reason. Like racism and sexism, speciesism is wrong.”

Peter Singer

Source: The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics (2017), p. 343