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
If we all think only of our own interests, we are headed for collective disaster - just look at what we are doing to our planet's climate.
If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.
There is no humane slaughter requirement for wild fish caught and killed at sea, nor, in most places, for farmed fish.
I don't think nationalism is alone holding the field; it's in contention with a lot of different things.
Once we ask why it should be that all human beings - including infants, the intellectually disabled, criminal psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest - have some kind of dignity or worth that no elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that justifies the inequality of humans and other animals.
I'm not overly alarmist about it, but I do think there are some worrying signs, like the growing accumulation of wealth by a very small proportion of the population, plus elections in the US are much more dominated by money than anywhere else calling itself a democracy.
If we are concerned about the exploitation of human workers in countries with low standards of worker protection, we should also be concerned about the treatment of even more defenceless non-human animals.
I don't think there's anything in the compromise that means that there's a clash of ethics.
Grain that is used to feed animals that end up on our tables as turkeys and hams could have gone to feed starving people.
We have a new generation of very rich people who want to do more with their money than buy a lot of expensive toys. They want to live meaningful lives.
Sometimes we know the best thing to do, but fail to do it. New year's resolutions are often like that. We make resolutions because we know it would be better for us to lose weight, or get fit, or spend more time with our children. The problem is that a resolution is generally easier to break than it is to keep.
The belief that the animals exist because God created them - and that he created them so we can better meet our needs - is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all.
More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.
But I think the majority of cows, and even more so chickens and pigs, are leading pretty miserable lives.