Peter Singer: Trending quotes

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Peter Singer: 108 quotes15 likes

“Philosophy is not politics, and we do our best, within our all-too-human limitations, to seek the truth, not to score points against opponents. There is little satisfaction in gaining an easy triumph over a weak opponent while ignoring better arguments against your views.”

'Last Generation': A Response http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/last-generation-a-response/, New York Times, June 16, 2010.

“Becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture. Nor is it an attempt to isolate oneself from the ugly realities of the world, to keep oneself pure and so without responsibility for the cruelty and carnage all around. Becoming a vegetarian is a highly practical and effective step one can take toward ending both the killing of nonhuman animals and the infliction of suffering upon them.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

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

“By ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make so much extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation

“The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.”

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 6, A New Understanding Of Ethics, p. 149

“The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.”

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

“We have to speak up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation

“I am a utilitarian. I am also a vegetarian. I am a vegetarian because I am a utilitarian.”

Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 9(4): 325 (1980).

“Arguments for preservation based on the beauty of wilderness are sometimes treated as if they were of little weight because they are "merely aesthetic". That is a mistake. We go to great lengths to preserve the artistic treasures of earlier human civilisations. It is difficult to imagine any economic gain that we would be prepared to accept as adequate compensation for, for instance, the destruction of the paintings in the Louvre. How should we compare the aesthetic value of wilderness with that of the paintings in the Louvre? Here, perhaps, judgment does become inescapably subjective; so I shall report my own experiences. I have looked at the paintings in the Louvre, and in many of the other great galleries of Europe and the United States. I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts; yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that they are filled when I walk in a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking a forested valley, or by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set amongst tall tree-ferns, growing in the shade of the forest canopy, I do not think I am alone in this; for many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation, rising to an almost mystical intensity.”

Peter Singer book Practical Ethics

Source: Practical Ethics

“If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation

“What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.”

“Hebrew word for "charity" tzedakah, simply means "justice" and as this suggests, for Jews, giving to the poor is no optional extra but an essential part of living a just life.”

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

“We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet- for the sake of hamburgers”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation

“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”

“Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.”

Source: Writings on an Ethical Life

“To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.”

Peter Singer book Practical Ethics

Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews - Richard Dawkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYNY2oKVWU, 2009. <br class="br">Source: Practical Ethics <br class="br">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.”

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.”

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