“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.”
Preface (p. vii)
The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (2015)
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Peter Singer 54
Australian philosopher 1946Related quotes
Chap. 3 : Freedom and Consequences
1990s, On Ethics and Economics (1991)
We have no ethical relation to the clod, the molecule, or the scale sloughed off from our skin on the back of our hand, because the clod, the molecule, and the scale have no feeling, no soul, no anything rendering them capable of being affected by us [...] The fact that a thing is an organism, that it has organisation, has in itself no more ethical significance than the fact that it has symmetry, or redness, or weight.
Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 169
Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 14.2
"Avant-garde and Kitsch" (p. 91)
Modern Culture (2000)
Science and Spirit interview (2004)
Context: We all eat or are eaten. That's the way life works, it's a greater rhythm. And that's why science and the understandings it has uncovered can be a source of joy.
This all relates to assent, a very important Judeo-Christian concept. "Thy will be done" is a God-kind of assent. "God works in mysterious ways," and you're supposed to give assent even if you don't like it. As a religious naturalist, I think of assent differently. Assent is saying, "Okay, for whatever reason, this is the way life works. It's an acceptance of what is. After that fundamental acceptance, I can live my life to minimize suffering and promote as much as good as I can, and try through whatever work I do to help others." We can't get around death, but we can get around poverty. We can try to avoid women being brutalized. We can curb environmental degradation.
One can start from the perspective of a religious naturalist or from the perspective of the world religions and arrive at the same place: a moral imperative that this Earth and its creatures be respected and cherished.
Journal entry (24 July 1916), p. 77e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Source: Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect
“We have the choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place--or not to bother”
Context: We hope for lives whose story leaves us looking admirable; we like our weaknesses to be hidden and deniable... We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience... Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world's resources, or the way our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the third world... Racists and sexists, like antebellum slave owners in America, always have to tell themselves a story that justifies their system.
Simon Blackburn, Being Good (2001)