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280f868
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Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.
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Peter Singer |
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381fe05
|
For nomadic societies, there was no point in owning anything that one could not carry, but once humans settled down and developed a system of money, that limit to acquisition disappeared.
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Peter Singer |
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04ace4a
|
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.
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euthanasia
utilitarianism
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Peter Singer |
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8b769f1
|
To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact
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meaning
moral-philosophy
nihilism
philosophy
purpose
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Peter Singer |
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ccdaf1c
|
Worldwide, the poor leave a very small carbon footprint, but they will suffer the most from climate change.
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peter singer |
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11277c1
|
So the researcher's central dilemma exists in an especially acute form in psychology: either the animal is not like us, in which case there is no reason for performing the experiment; or else the animal is like us, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us. Another
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Peter Singer |
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c60fa79
|
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.
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Peter Singer |
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d7ddd9f
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A majority of people in these surveys also said that America gives too much aid--but when they were asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid 'cut' to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!
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ethics
foreign-aid
moral-philosophy
poverty
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Peter Singer |
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862627b
|
If doing the most you can for others means that you are also flourishing, then that is the best possible outcome for everyone.
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Peter Singer |
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40cccdb
|
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.
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Peter Singer |
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c3f30d5
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If you are paying for something to drink when safe drinking water comes out of the tap, you have money to spend on things you don't really need.
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Peter Singer |
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62d01cd
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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.
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Peter Singer |
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a78e42f
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The world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument.
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Peter Singer |
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ba21859
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Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval scholar whose ideas became the semi-official philosophy of the Roman Catholic church, wrote that whatever we have in "superabundance"--that is, above and beyond what will reasonably satisfy our own needs and those of our family, for the present and the foreseeable future--"is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance."
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Peter Singer |
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29bafe2
|
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.
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Peter Singer |
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bf6db77
|
Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in ..
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Peter Singer |
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4acfd87
|
An area of land used for crops will feed about ten times as many people as the same area of land used for grass-fed beef.
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ethics
morality
philosophy
veganism
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Peter Singer |
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8b6996b
|
Terrorism has made our world an integrated community in a new and frightening way. Not merely the activities of our neighbors, but those of the inhabitants of the most remote mountain valleys of the farthest-flung countries of our planet, have become our business. We need to extend the reach of the criminal law there and to have the means to bring terrorists to justice without declaring war on an entire country in order to do it. For this w..
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philosophy
political-philosophy
politics
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Peter Singer |
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bceb061
|
The big corporations and those who must compete with them are not concerned with a sense of harmony among plants, animals, and nature.
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Peter Singer |
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8d88ef9
|
Unless you can refute the central argument of this book, you should now recognize that speciesism is wrong, and this means that, if you take morality seriously, you should try to eliminate speciesist practices from your own life, and oppose them elsewhere. Otherwise no basis remains from which you can, without hypocrisy, criticize racism or sexism.
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Peter Singer |
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bc447e8
|
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,
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ethics
kindness
moral-philosophy
morality
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Peter Singer |
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cf57761
|
moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.
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moral-philosophy
philosophy
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Peter Singer |
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2d19551
|
If we could see our lives objectively, we could see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.
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Peter Singer |
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7ecb803
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There is a new wave of interest in exploring how to frame choices so that people make better decisions. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, professors of economics and law, respectively, teamed up to write Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which advocates using defaults to nudge us to make better choices.9 Even when we are choosing in our own interests, we often choose unwisely. When employees have the option of ..
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Peter Singer |
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af2c3a2
|
Since 1988, Iran has had a government-funded, regulated system for purchasing kidneys.
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Peter Singer |
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bde9e3a
|
While it is absurd to blame Marx for something he did not foresee and certainly would have condemned if he had foreseen it, the distanced between Marx's predicted communist society and the form taken by 'communism' in the twentieth century may in the end be traceable to Marx's misconception of the flexibility of human nature.
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Peter Singer |
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c09d753
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We need to get over our reluctance to speak openly about the good we do. Silent giving will not change a culture that deems it sensible to spend all your money on yourself and your family, rather than to help those in greater need--even though helping others is likely to bring more fulfillment in the long run.
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Peter Singer |
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0815b4a
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At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the 'war on terrorism' and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have ..
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extreme-poverty
poverty
war-on-terror
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Peter Singer |
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141528a
|
Pro Life' or 'Right to Life' movement is misnamed. Those who protest against abortion but dine regularly on the bodies of chickens, pigs and calves can hardly claim to have concern for 'life' as such. Their concern about embryos and fetuses suggests only a biased concern for the lives of members of our own species.
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ethics
morality
philosophy
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Peter Singer |
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8978a9d
|
Many people who think nothing of buying factory-farmed ham or chicken from a supermarket are quick to condemn hunting; yet hunting is more defensible than factory farming.
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ethics
morality
philosophy-of-life
veganism
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Peter Singer |
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f0f646f
|
Laws and a settled decision procedure to generate them are a good thing. This gives us one important reason for obeying the law. By obeying the law, I can contribute to the respect in which the established decision procedure and the laws are held. By disobeying, I set an example to others that may lead them to disobey too.
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ethics
law
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Peter Singer |
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be55888
|
For example, in many developing countries, children, and in particular girls, do not spend enough time at school, even when school is free, to learn as they should. To change this, the following strategies have been suggested: *Unconditional cash transfers for girls; *Cash transfers for girls, conditional on attendance; *Merit scholarships for girls; *Free primary school uniforms; *Deworming through primary schools; *Providing information t..
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Peter Singer |
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2fa499a
|
those who have enough to spend on luxuries, yet fail to share even a tiny fraction of their income with the poor, must bear some responsibility for the deaths they could have prevented.
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peter singer |
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3abc1b6
|
Whether particular people with the capacity to take an objective point of view actually do take this objective viewpoint into account when they act will depend on the strength of their desire to avoid inconsistency between the way they reason publicly and the way they act.
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Peter Singer |
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71cac96
|
Egoism... is not eliminated by economic reorganization or by material abundance. When basic needs are satisfied, new 'needs' emerge. In our society, people want no simply clothes, but fashionable clothes; not shelter, but a house to display their wealth and taste.
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Peter Singer |
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aa9d444
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The Western principle of the sanctity of human life--a principle which is unique in the sharpness with which it separates the wrongness of taking the life of any human being, no matter how severely defective, from the wrongness of taking the life of any non-human animal, no matter how intelligent--can, as I have argued elsewhere, be explained as the legacy of the Judeo-Christian world view, in which humans, but not animals, are made in the ..
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Peter Singer |
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599c78a
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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.
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Peter Singer |
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f3100da
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Pacifists have usually regarded the use of violence as absolutely wrong, irrespective of its consequences. This, like other 'no matter what' prohibitions, assumes the validity of the distinction between acts and omissions. Without this distinction, pacifists who refuse to use violence when it is the only means of preventing greater violence would be responsible for the greater violence they fail to prevent.
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ethics
pacifism
violence
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Peter Singer |
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f1e7532
|
Whereas the property-owning middle class could win freedom for themselves on the basis of rights to property--thus excluding others from the freedom they gain--the property-less working class possess nothing but their title as human beings. Thus they can liberate themselves only by liberating all humanity.
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marxism
proletariat
property-rights
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Peter Singer |
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dbc2b93
|
The suffering of abused pets amounts to a tiny fraction of the suffering we inflict on animals. In 2012 there were 164 million owned dogs and cats in the United States.2 The majority of them probably live reasonably good lives, but even if every single one of them were abused, this number would be dwarfed by the 9.1 billion animals annually raised and slaughtered for food in the United States.3 Factory-farmed animals have to endure a lifeti..
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Peter Singer |
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84be53d
|
In some parts of the world, what you are doing is already apparent. According to the World Health Organization, the warming of the planet caused an additional 140,000 deaths in 2004, as compared with the number of deaths there would have been had average global temperatures remained as they were during the period 1961 to 1990. This means that climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occurred in the terrorist attacks ..
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environmental-ethics
global-warming
population-ethics
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Peter Singer |
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1c9d560
|
There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increase its value, its could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest.
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environmentalism
ethics
moral-philosophy
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Peter Singer |
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c6688c9
|
Most effective altruists are not saints but ordinary people like you and me, so very few effective altruists claim to live a fully ethical life. Most of them are somewhere on the continuum between a minimally acceptable ethical life and a fully ethical life. That doesn't mean that they are constantly feeling guilty about not being morally perfect. Effective altruists don't see a lot of point in feeling guilty. They prefer to focus on the go..
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Peter Singer |
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a3c0362
|
If you agree that bringing someone into existence can be bad for that person and if you also accept the argument that bringing someone into existence can't be good for that person, then this leads to a strange conclusion: being born could harm you but it couldn't help you.
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peter singer |