411 Quotes by Peter Singer

I’m a Utilitarian, so I don’t see the rule against lying as absolute; it’s always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise.

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

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.

At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn’t mean that you can’t think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.

Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

I suppose what’s happened recently has confirmed suspicions I voiced in the book, and I think made clearer some of those things that I point out. For instance I have a section of the book where I talk about the possibility of torture.

If evolution is a struggle for survival, why hasn’t it ruthlessly eliminated altruists, who seem to increase another’s prospects of survival at the cost of their own?

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.

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