Peter Singer
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer, ACis an Australian moral philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book, Animal Liberation, a canonical text in animal liberation theory, and his essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, a key text...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth6 July 1946
CountryAustralia
thinking impact people
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.
animal thinking want
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.
philosophy sacred life-is
The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.
philosophy believe thinking
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.
animal issues support
Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is.
animal understanding suffering
Sometimes animals may suffer more because of their more limited understanding. If, for instance, we are taking prisoners in wartime we can explain to them that although they must submit to capture, search, and confinement, they will not otherwise be harmed and will be set free at the conclusion of hostilities. If we capture wild animals, however, we cannot explain that we are not threatening their lives. A wild animal cannot distinguish an attempt to overpower and confine from an attempt to kill; the one causes as much terror as the other.
empathy suffering emotion
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.
animal long important
There has been opposition to experimenting on animals for a long time. This opposition has made little headway because experimenters, backed by commercial firms that profit by supplying laboratory animals and equipment, have been able to convince legislators and the public that opposition comes from uninformed fanatics who consider the interests of animals more important than the interests of human beings.
gambling hamburgers agribusiness
We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet- for the sake of hamburgers
loss happy-life views
When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.
dog communication animal
If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant.
issues looks fiction
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.
animal vegetarian vegan
Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.
groups dolphins mammals
Dolphins are social mammals, capable of enjoying their lives. They form close bonds with other members of their group.