Peter Singer Quotes

#1. If doing the most you can for others means that you are also flourishing, then that is the best possible outcome for everyone.

Peter Singer

#2. 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

#3. In a situation where many national leaders do the same thing and look out for national interests, and with an issue like global warming, you're likely to get no solution, so I think you have to have some kind of ethical trump on some of those issues.

Peter Singer

#4. 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

#5. Pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being that suffers is not a member of our own species.

Peter Singer

#6. There are plenty of violent people, but for any randomly selected person today the chances of meeting a violent death at the hands of his or her fellow humans is lower now than it has ever been in human history.

Peter Singer

#7. Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.

Peter Singer

#8. Why ... is the hunter who shoots a deer for venison subject to more criticism than the person who buys a ham at the supermarket? Overall, it is probably the intensively reared pig who has suffered more.

Peter Singer

#9. 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

#10. When we eat plants, food takes on a different quality. We take from the earth food that is ready for us and does not fight against us as we take it.

Peter Singer

#11. Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.

Peter Singer

#12. There could conceivably be circumstances in which an experiment on an animal stands to reduce suffering so much that it would be permissible to carry it out even if it involved harm to the animal ... [even if] the animal were a human being.

Peter Singer

#13. As this chapter has shown, we are in the midst of an emergency in which appalling suffering is being inflicted on millions of animals for purposes that on any impartial view are obviously inadequate to justify the suffering.

Peter Singer

#14. What is there about the notion of a person, at law, that makes every living member of the species Homo sapiens a person, irrespective of their mental capacities, but excludes every nonhuman animal - again, irrespective of their mental capacities?

Peter Singer

#15. The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.

Peter Singer

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

Peter Singer

#17. 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

#18. In the United States, 97 percent of those classified by the Census Bureau as poor own a color TV.

Peter Singer

#19. There is a growing movement called effective altruism. It's important because it combines both the heart and the head.

Peter Singer

#20. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet- for the sake of hamburgers

Peter Singer

#21. 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

#22. It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.

Peter Singer

#23. 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.

Peter Singer

#24. Almost any established decision procedure is better than a resort to force; for when force is used, people get hurt and the desire for retaliation is likely to lead to more violence. Moreover, most decision procedures produce results at least as beneficial and just as a resort to force.

Peter Singer

#25. Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

Peter Singer

#26. I don't think there's much point in bemoaning the state of the world unless there's some way you can think of to improve it. Otherwise, don't bother writing a book; go and find a tropical island and lie in the sun.

Peter Singer

#27. Christian magazine Sojourners, likes to point out that the Bible contains more than three thousand references to alleviating poverty - enough reason, he thinks, for making this a central moral issue for Christians.

Peter Singer

#28. Well the real concept of basic needs if you cut it right down are simply the physical needs that are unavoidable for all of us. So to have enough calories to keep our bodies going. Have shelter from extreme elements. To have water that is safe to drink, So I think that's the core of it.

Peter Singer

#29. The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world.

Peter Singer

#30. Reason is inherently expansionist. It seeks universal application.

Peter Singer

#31. 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

#32. Do business managers have a commitment to anything more than the success of their company and to making money? It would be hard to say that they do. Indeed, many business leaders deny that there is any conflict between self-interest and the interests of all.

Peter Singer

#33. If we avoid junk foods that are high in sugar or fats and nothing else, about the only way we can fail to get enough protein is if we are on a diet that is insufficient in calories.36 Protein

Peter Singer

#34. To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do what will have the best consequences for all of those affected.

Peter Singer

#35. Effective altruists, as we have seen, need not be utilitarians, but they share a number of moral judgments with utilitarians. In particular, they agree with utilitarians that, other things being equal, we ought to do the most good we can.

Peter Singer

#36. 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

#37. Putting yourself in the place of others ... is what thinking ethically is all about.

Peter Singer

#38. All I say about severely disabled babies is that when a life is so miserable it is not worth living, then it is permissible to give it a lethal injection. These are decisions that should be taken by parents - never the state - in consultation with their doctors.

Peter Singer

#39. There are a lot of weapons that we've developed which we've pulled back from - biological weapons, chemical weapons, etc. This may be the case with armed autonomous robotics, where we ultimately pull back from them.

Peter Singer

#40. It's because I work in ethics, and, more specifically, applied ethics, that I think it's important that if you have things to say that you think are right and you think could make the world a better place, it's important that many people read about them.

Peter Singer

#41. Until we boycott meat, and all other products of animal factories, we are, each one of us, contributing to the continued existence, prosperity, and growth of factory farming and all the other cruel practices used in rearing animals for food.

Peter Singer

#42. 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.

Peter Singer

#43. Should one break in and free the animals? That is illegal, but the obligation to obey the law is not absolute. It was justifiably broken by those who helped runaway slaves in the American South, to mention only one possible parallel.

Peter Singer

#44. At present scientists do not look for alternatives simply because they do not care enough about the animals they are using.

Peter Singer

#45. So it is worse to slap a baby than a horse, if both slaps are administered with equal force.

Peter Singer

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, we are not the left.

Peter Singer

#49. We need to learn how to capture and kill wild fish humanely - or, if that is not possible, to find less cruel and more sustainable alternatives to eating them.

Peter Singer

#50. What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or rational argument, that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.

Peter Singer

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. Diamonds have an image of purity and light. They are given as a pledge of love and worn as a symbol of commitment.

Peter Singer

#55. If we think that democracy is a good thing, then we must believe that the public should know as much as possible about what the government it elects is doing. Snowden has said that he made the disclosures because "the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.

Peter Singer

#56. If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government,

Peter Singer

#57. Most of the robots being developed for home use are functional in design - Gecko's homecare robot looks rather like the Star Wars robot R2-D2. Honda and Sony are designing robots that look more like the same movie's 'android' C-3PO.

Peter Singer

#58. Voluntary euthanasia occurs only when, to the best of medical knowledge, a person is suffering from an incurable and painful or extremely distressing condition. In these circumstances one cannot say that to choose to die quickly is obviously irrational.

Peter Singer

#59. If a flock of chickens is without water on a hot day, and all you have to do to prevent them from dying slowly and painfully is turn on a tap, you ought to turn it on. If to do so you have to walk a few extra steps in shoes that pinch your little toe, you ought to walk those few extra steps.

Peter Singer

#60. 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.

Peter Singer

#61. 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

#62. Worldwide, the poor leave a very small carbon footprint, but they will suffer the most from climate change.

Peter Singer

#63. Every profession will have its rogues, of course, no matter what oaths are sworn, but many health care professionals have a real commitment to serving the best interests of their clients.

Peter Singer

#64. Why [..] should the boundary of sacrosanct life match the boundary of our species?

Peter Singer

#65. The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.

Peter Singer

#66. Why should people be dying from an invariably fatal disease while a potential cure is tested on animals who do not normally develop AIDS anyway? The

Peter Singer

#67. One might also ask why we should develop energy-intensive robots to work in one of the few areas - care for children or elderly people - in which people with little education can find employment.

Peter Singer

#68. 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

#69. All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.

Peter Singer

#70. If it is so easy to help people in real need through no fault of their own, and yet we fail to do so, aren't we doing something wrong? At a minimum, I hope this book will persuade you that there is something deeply askew with our widely accepted views about what it is to live a good life.

Peter Singer

#71. But pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being

Peter Singer

#72. Cutting out meat would do more to help combat climate change than any other action we could feasibly take in the next 20 years.

Peter Singer

#73. For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them ... The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment.

Peter Singer

#74. Since 1988, Iran has had a government-funded, regulated system for purchasing kidneys.

Peter Singer

#75. Their reliance on biblical quotations does not augur well for their for their openness to moral reasoning ...

Peter Singer

#76. What she really wants is a place with more tolerance for differences, less emphasis on materialism, where people value creativity and are interested in working on issues relating to peace and justice.

Peter Singer

#77. To turn the other cheek is to teach would-be cheats that cheating pays.

Peter Singer

#78. When diamonds' role in fuelling violent conflict in Africa gained worldwide attention, the diamond industry established the Kimberley process in order to keep "blood diamonds" out of international trade.

Peter Singer

#79. In a democracy, citizens pass judgment on their government, and if they are kept in the dark about what their government is doing, they cannot be in a position to make well-grounded decisions.

Peter Singer

#80. It is in the rightness of our cause, and not the fear of our bombs, that our prospects of victory lie.

Peter Singer

#81. Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper.

Peter Singer

#82. probably the best-known tenet of modern moral philosophy: the doctrine that there is an unbridgeable gulf between facts and values, between descriptions of what is and prescriptions of what ought to be.

Peter Singer

#83. I think ethics is always there; it's not always a very thoughtful or reflective ethics.

Peter Singer

#84. All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.

Peter Singer

#85. 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.

Peter Singer

#86. I believe that in this new world that we live in, we often have a responsibility, you know, to actually go beyond the thou shalt nots - that is, the not harming others - and say we can help others and we should be helping others.

Peter Singer

#87. 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

#88. According to the Dominant Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings ...

Peter Singer

#89. Nineteen thousand children [are] dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference.

Peter Singer

#90. In explaining the importance of understanding our biology, Dawkins writes; Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something which no other species has ever aspired to.

Peter Singer

#91. Should thousands of animals suffer so that a new kind of lipstick or floor wax can be put on the market?

Peter Singer

#92. There can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine.

Peter Singer

#93. If extreme poverty is allowed to increase, it will give rise to new problems, including new diseases that will spread from countries that cannot provide adequate healthcare to those that can. Poverty will lead to more migrants seeking to move, whether legally or not, to rich nations.

Peter Singer

#94. There is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.

Peter Singer

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

Peter Singer

#96. We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.

Peter Singer

#97. If we can prevent something bad, without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.

Peter Singer

#98. Of course, infanticide needs to be strictly legally controlled and rare - but it should not be ruled out, any more than abortion.

Peter Singer

#99. Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written.

Peter Singer

#100. Animals, or at least those who are conscious and capable of suffering or enjoying their lives, are not things for us to use in whatever way we find convenient.

Peter Singer