The Best Peter Singer quotes

Ethics is inescapable. — Peter Singer

I think ethics is always there; it’s not always a very thoughtful or reflective ethics. — Peter Singer

More often there’s a compromise between ethics and expediency. — Peter Singer

I don’t think there’s anything in the compromise that means that there’s a clash of ethics. — Peter Singer

Ethics seems a morass which we have to cross, but get hopelessly bogged in when we make the attempt. — Peter Singer

The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings. — Peter Singer

Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing. — Peter Singer

The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone’s advantage. — Peter Singer

Interest in business ethics courses has surged, and student activities at leading business schools are more focused than ever before on making business serve long–term social values. — Peter Singer

The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval. — Peter Singer

Probability is the guide of life, and of death, too. — Peter Singer

If our life has no meaning other than our own happiness, we are likely to find that when we have obtained what we think we need to be happy, happiness itself still eludes us. — Peter Singer

If we’re going to live an ethical life, it’s not enough just to follow the thou–shalt–nots. … If we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little. — Peter Singer

Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans. — Peter Singer

Why [..] should the boundary of sacrosanct life match the boundary of our species? — Peter Singer

But I think the majority of cows, and even more so chickens and pigs, are leading pretty miserable lives. — Peter Singer

Dolphins are social mammals, capable of enjoying their lives. They form close bonds with other members of their group. — Peter Singer

One person i know who’s involved in the life you can save said ‘the life that i saved is my own, because i now really feel that i’ve got a purpose for my life, and its meaningful and i’m happy what i’m doing’. — Peter Singer

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. — Peter Singer

At the moment there’s a lot of low–hanging fruit in terms of lives thAt can be saved cheaply. — Peter Singer

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. — Peter Singer

The traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological and demographic developments. — Peter Singer

We should aim for our children to be good people, and to live ethical lives that manifest concern for others as well as for themselves. — Peter Singer

We should give the same respect to the lives of animals as we do to the lives of humans. — Peter Singer

What you could say, and what I do argue in the book, is that he doesn’t have as much concern for the lives of Iraqis as he does for the lives of Americans, or even frozen American embryos. — Peter Singer

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

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. — Peter Singer

What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have. — Peter Singer

If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end. — Peter Singer

That’s a central part of philosophy, of ethics. What do I owe to strangers? What do I owe to my family? What is it to live a good life? Those are questions which we face as individuals. — Peter Singer

The future of the world depends on how well we meet it. — Peter Singer

If somebody has an extreme amount of wealth and is not using it for some good purpose, only for their own enjoyment or satisfaction, then clearly there’s a moral failing in the world in which we live. — Peter Singer

According to the Dominant Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings. — Peter Singer

In an ideal world, the amount of money we spend on medical research to prevent or cure a disease would be proportional to its seriousness and the number of people who suffer from it. — Peter Singer

It’s also much clearer how much damage the occupation of Iraq is doing to America’s reputation and prestige around the world; and that’s just starting now to hit home in the United States. — Peter Singer

Had Rumsfeld said at any time ‘get me a report on what’s going on’, he could have had it. You’re right, it depends on choices that we make, which parts of the world we want to be in immediate contact with. — Peter Singer

In my world of the people who study war and defense issues, we simply did not talk about robotics. We do not talk about it because it’s seen as mere science fiction. It’s cold, hard, metallic reality. — Peter Singer

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. — Peter Singer

The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world. — Peter Singer

The world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument. — Peter Singer

You shouldn’t say ‘animals’ to distinguish between humans and non–humans. We are all animals. — Peter Singer

An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain–damaged human would be justifiable. — Peter Singer

At present scientists do not look for alternatives simply because they do not care enough about the animals they are using. — Peter Singer

If they [animals] were really to get the equal consideration that I believe they should, we wouldn’t have commercial animal production in this country. — Peter Singer

It takes twenty–one pounds of protein fed to a calf to produce a single pound of animal protein for humans. We get back less than 5 percent of what we put in. — Peter Singer

In appropriate circumstances we are justified in using humans to achieve goals (or the goal of assisting animals). — Peter Singer

Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse–and persuading others not to support it–is. — Peter Singer

The big corporations and those who must compete with them are not concerned with a sense of harmony among plants, animals, and nature. — Peter Singer

Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo–Christian religious tradition. — Peter Singer

All the arguments to prove man’s superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals. — Peter Singer

We are not especially ‘interested in’ animals. Neither of us had ever been inordinately fond of dogs, cats, or horses in the way that many people are. We didn’t ‘love’ animals. — Peter Singer

Grain that is used to feed animals that end up on our tables as turkeys and hams could have gone to feed starving people. — Peter Singer

Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics. — Peter Singer

Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human. — Peter Singer

Becoming a vegan is a sure way of completely avoiding participation in the abuse of farmed animals. Vegans are a living demonstration of the fact that we do not need to exploit animals for food. — Peter Singer

My own view is that being a vegetarian or vegan is not an end in itself, but a means towards reducing both human and animal suffering and leaving a habitable planet to future generations. — Peter Singer

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. — Peter Singer

The unchallenged assumption is that humans may use animals for their own purposes, and they may raise and kill them to satisfy their preference for a diet containing animal flesh. — Peter Singer

We think of lions and wolves as savage because they kill; but they must kill, or starve. Humans kill other animals for sport, to satisfy their curiosity, to beautify their bodies, and to please their palates. — Peter Singer

Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong. — Peter Singer

I do not believe that it could never be justifiable to experiment on a brain–damaged human. — Peter Singer

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. — Peter Singer

We wait until Pandora’s box is opened before we say, ‘Wow, maybe we should understand what’s in that box.’ This is the story of humans on every problem. — Peter Singer

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

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

Putting the AR movement directly in opposition to the environmental movement, which should be our natural allies in fighting human arrogance and domination of the planet. — Peter Singer

Human decision–making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short–term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long–term planning. — Peter Singer

We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you’re talking about a set of worked–out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product. — Peter Singer

Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture. — Peter Singer