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
accepts almost concept death everybody people shows
Almost everybody accepts that some people can be killed. 'The concept of 'brain death' - the belief that people on respirators can legitimately be killed - shows that.
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Bush is morally a universalist. For instance, he says the freedom is good, the same thing is good, all over the world. So in that sense he's a universalist.
asks ethical good hold might perhaps plans position practical reasons reduce secret war wrong
You might hold an ethical position that it's wrong to lie, but if you have plans for a war in Iraq, and you want to keep them secret for practical reasons - to reduce casualties, perhaps - and someone asks you about those plans, you may need to lie for a 'good' outcome.
considered generally good knowledge thinks
Knowledge is generally considered a good thing; so, presumably, knowing more about how the U.S. thinks and operates around the world is also good.
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They tend to be pretty abstract ones then, like doing what will have the best consequences; obviously you wouldn't specify what consequences are best, they may be different in some circumstances, so at a lower, more specific level, you may well get differences.
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The price we are willing to pay for safety cannot be infinite. It is distasteful to put a price on human life, but the more we spend on safety, the less we will have for our other goals.
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Some vegetarians and vegans may object to in vitro meat, because they don't see the need for meat at all. That's fine for them, and of course they are free to remain vegetarians and vegans and choose not to eat in vitro meat.
attempts comparable countries developing endowments government huge incentive lack large overthrow power provide reason resource seize worse
Paradoxically, resource-rich developing countries are often worse off than comparable countries that lack those resources. One reason for this is that large resource endowments provide a huge financial incentive for attempts to overthrow the government and seize power.
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For example, one way of giving yourself a strong incentive to reach your goal is to commit to pay money to someone if you fail. Better yet, you can specify that you will have to pay a certain sum to a cause that you detest.
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Americans think they're the leader of the world and yet can say that they're putting their economic interests ahead of the lives of - quite possibly - tens of millions of people who over the next 50 years will die because of floods or storms or tropical diseases or whatever. I guess that sort of thing makes me angry.
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Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm.
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I just don't think that the differences you make by donating to a museum or an art gallery really compare to the differences you make by donating to the charities that fight global poverty.
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For a long time, rich countries have promised to reduce poverty but have failed to match their words with adequate action. Of course, some important progress has been made and millions of lives have been saved, but millions more could be saved.
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In most of the world, it is accepted that if animals are to be killed for food, they should be killed without suffering.