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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8221831 | Or consider how we citizens of rich countries obtain our oil and minerals. Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of tiny Equatorial Guinea, sells most of his country's oil to American corporations, among them Exxon Mobil, Marathon, and Hess. Although his official salary is a modest $60,000, this ruler of a country of 550,000 people is richer than Queen Elizabeth II. He owns six private jets and a $35 million house in Malibu, as well as other houses .. | Peter Singer | ||
| ce5e52f | The United States government continues to pour billions of dollars into research on cancer, while it also subsidizes the tobacco industry. Much of the research money goes toward animal experiments, many of them only remotely connected with fighting cancer--experimenters have been known to relabel their work "cancer research" when they found they could get more money for it that way than under some other label." | Peter Singer | ||
| 581e179 | 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 | ||
| b1b482e | Some discoveries would probably have been delayed, or perhaps not made at all; but many false leads would also not have been pursued, and it is possible that medicine would have developed in a very different and more efficacious direction, emphasizing healthy living rather than cure. In | Peter Singer | ||
| ef68cc1 | There is no sense of loss in this transcendence of the quest to satisfy desires that previously seemed so important or of the pleasures that came from their satisfaction, for enlightenment involves detachment from one's desires. | Peter Singer | ||
| 208c038 | Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as this solution. | Peter Singer | ||
| 4c13d4d | Perhaps it is not love that motivates effective altruists but empathy, the ability to put oneself in the position of others and identify with their feelings or emotions. Writers like de Waal and Jeremy Rifkin have seized on the idea of empathy as, to use de Waal's words, "the grand theme of our time."4 Rifkin believes that civilization has spread the reach of empathy beyond the family and the community so that it covers all of humankind." | Peter Singer | ||
| 6567364 | 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 | ||
| d05deda | Let him who is honoured be meek. | Aramaic proverbs | ||
| 2e4dc4a | Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family--that's impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don't empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love. | Peter Singer | ||
| 04c5bde | So it is worse to slap a baby than a horse, if both slaps are administered with equal force. | Peter Singer | ||
| 222ffc3 | Is the fact that other people are not doing their fair share a sufficient reason for allowing a child to die when you could easily rescue that child? I think the answer is clear: No. The others have, by refusing to help with the rescue, made themselves irrelevant. They might as well be so many rocks. According to the fair-share view, in fact, it would be better for the children if they were rocks, because then you would be obliged to wade b.. | Peter Singer | ||
| a1b7708 | I argued against the view that the only obligation we have to strangers is to avoid harming them; but even if we were to take that view, the facts of climate change would demonstrate clearly that we are harming hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of the world's poor. | global-warming | Peter Singer | |
| 201cb93 | What we are doing to strangers in other communities right now is, therefore, far more serious and far more widespread than the harm we would do if we were in the habit of occasionally sending out a group of warriors to rape and pillage a village or two. Yet causing imperceptible harm at a distance by the release of waste gases is a completely new form of harm, and so we lack any kind of instinctive inhibitions or emotional response against .. | ethics global-warming | Peter Singer | |
| 8e7cc80 | the idea that there are objective ethical truths that are independent of what anyone desires. | Peter Singer | ||
| 513aaf6 | Climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occurred in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. | ethics global-warming | Peter Singer | |
| 48e4397 | Everyone has boundaries. If you find yourself doing something that makes you bitter, it is time to reconsider. Is | Peter Singer | ||
| 1452342 | To forestall misunderstandings: there is value in creating and enjoying art. To many people, drawing, painting, sculpting, singing, and playing a musical instrument are vital forms of self-expression, and their lives would be poorer without them. People produce art in all cultures and in all kinds of situations, even when they cannot satisfy their basic physical needs. Other people enjoy seeing art. In a world in which everyone had enough t.. | Peter Singer | ||
| 7ff07ea | Population growth is not a reason against giving aid but a reason for reconsidering the kind of aid to give. | ethics global-warming | Peter Singer | |
| 8183a21 | Target groups you care about that other people mostly don't, and take advantage of strategies other people are biased against using. | Peter Singer | ||
| bb978de | 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 | ||
| f81f9c4 | The world does produce enough to feed its inhabitants - in fact we waste vast quantities of grain and soybeans by feeding them to animals, getting back from the animals only a small fraction of the nutritional value of the plant foods we put into them. | ethics global-warming | Peter Singer | |
| 72f5d94 | Peter Singer, a moral philosopher and professor at Princeton University points out, however, that there are in fact three freedoms at stake here: the freedom to donate blood for no financial reward, the freedom to sell blood, but also the freedom to give blood as a priceless gift whose value hinges solely on the need of the recipient, because it cannot be bought.14 | Vaddhaka Linn | ||
| 87b214a | 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 | ||
| 572402c | they took this as a law of nature, a self-evident necessary truth. On the contrary, says Marx, it bears the stamp of a society 'in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him'. | Peter Singer | ||
| 04b257c | We have an obligation to help those in absolute poverty that is no less strong than our obligation to rescue a drowning child from a pond. | ethics global-warming | Peter Singer | |
| 7ecf209 | If we want to encourage people to do the most good, we should not focus on whether what they are doing involves a sacrifice, in the sense that it makes them less happy. We should instead focus on whether what makes them happy involves increasing the well-being of others. If we wish, we can redefine the terms egoism and altruism in this way, so that they refer to whether people's interests include a strong concern for others--it if does, the.. | Peter Singer | ||
| 0906c77 | To explain our conventional ethical attitudes, is not to justify them. | morality philosophy | Peter Singer | |
| 489999f | The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. | Aravind Adiga | ||
| 6dd79f2 | In fact, the Nazis did not have a euthanasia program, in the proper sense of the word. Their so-called euthanasia program was not motivated by concern for the suffering of those killed. If it had been, they would not have kept their operations secret, deceived relatives about the cause of death of those killed, or exempted from the program certain privileged classes, such as veterans of the armed services or relatives of the euthanasia staf.. | euthanasia morality nazi philosophy | Peter Singer | |
| 5750431 | To argue against abortion on the grounds that it prevents beings of high intrinsic value coming into the world is implicitly to condemn practices that reduce the future human population: contraception, whether by 'artificial' means or by 'natural' means such as abstinence on days when the woman is likely to be fertile, and also celibacy. This argument does not provide any reason for thinking abortion worse than any other means of population.. | ethics morality philosophy | Peter Singer | |
| f9479c8 | Dairy farmers routinely remove calves from their mothers at an early age so that the milk will be available for humans; anyone who has lived on a dairy farm will know that, for days after the calves have gone, their mothers keep calling for them. | ethics morality philosophy-of-life veganism | Peter Singer | |
| f4a8373 | It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold. | bias prejudice rationality values | Peter Singer | |
| d94154e | Wages therefore tend to the lowest possible level compatible with keeping an adequate supply of workers alive. | Peter Singer | ||
| 1d58152 | In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. (CM 254) | Peter Singer | ||
| f787050 | Ten things you should never do when you form a group 1. Work with your friends (they won't be for long if you do) 2. Let the singer do his own backing vocals (this is a great opportunity for the band to pull together - ignore it at your peril; see also 'narcissism') 3. Have a couple in the band (they will always conspire against you) 4. Listen to an A&R man (apart from Pete Tong, everyone I have ever met has been an idiot) 5. Let your manag.. | Peter Hook | ||
| c4405c5 | Since reasoning alone proved incapable of fully resolving the clash between self-interest and ethics, it is unlikely that rational argument will persuade every rational person to act ethically. | Peter Singer | ||
| 8349823 | The perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile in a way that is independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found. | Peter Singer | ||
| b266eee | In the former, Kant pictured man as a being capable of following a rational moral law, but also liable to be swayed from it by the non-rational desires which have their origin in our physical nature. To act morally is thus always a struggle. Victory is to be won by the suppression of all desires except the feeling of reverence for the moral law, which leads us to do our duty for its own sake. | Peter Singer | ||
| 0acb4d8 | Our own happiness, therefore, is a by-product of aiming at something else and is not to be obtained by setting our sights on happiness alone. | Peter Singer | ||
| f79c605 | The perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile... independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found. | Peter Singer | ||
| ff93de4 | There's the claim that the only progress made is in posing problems that scientists can answer. That philosophy never has the means to answer problems--it's just biding its time till the scientists arrive on the scene. You hear this quite often. There is, among some scientists, a real anti-philosophical bias. The sense that philosophy will eventually disappear. But there's a lot of philosophical progress, it's just a progress that's very ha.. | animal-rights bigotry human-rights philosophy prejudice progress science thinking thought | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein | |
| d5ba67e | The moral unity to be expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a unity of tendency. . . . At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world. --W. E. H. LECKY, The History of European Morals | Peter Singer | ||
| 59ea933 | He laboured to promote international arbitration. | Arbitration |