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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.

Peter Singer

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Peter Singer
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: July 6
Philosopher
Politician
Professor
Writer
Melbourne
Australia
Peter Albert David Singer
Peter A. D. Singer
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Suspicion
Book
Recently
Made
Torture
Voiced
Things
Suppose
Suspicions
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Possibility
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More quotes by Peter Singer

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History is not going to look kindly on us if we just keep our head in the sand on armed autonomous robotics issue because it sounds too science fiction.
Peter Singer
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My fear is that that's what's going to happen with robotics and the military. Importantly, this discussion has to involve not just the scientists, but also the political scientists. It's got to be a multidisciplinary discussion. You can't have it be another repeat of what happened with the people working on the atomic bomb.
Peter Singer
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To turn the other cheek is to teach would-be cheats that cheating pays.
Peter Singer
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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
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Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written.
Peter Singer
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It is an indication of the extent to which people are now isolated from the animals they eat that children brought up on storybooks that lead them to think of a farm as a place where animals wander around freely in idyllic conditions might be able to live out their entire lives without ever being forced to revise this rosy image.
Peter Singer
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Sometimes we know the best thing to do, but fail to do it. New year's resolutions are often like that. We make resolutions because we know it would be better for us to lose weight, or get fit, or spend more time with our children. The problem is that a resolution is generally easier to break than it is to keep.
Peter Singer
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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
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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
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Will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible?
Peter Singer
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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
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Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans.
Peter Singer
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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.
Peter Singer
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When children see animals in a circus, they learn that animals exist for our amusement. Quite apart from the cruelty involved in training and confining these animals, the whole idea that we should enjoy the humiliating spectacle of an elephant or lion made to perform circus tricks shows a lack of respect for the animals as individuals.
Peter Singer
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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
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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
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According to classical utilitarianism, the only intrinsic good is happiness the only intrinsic bad is pain. That implies no intrinsic value in preserving nature, that preserving an endangered plant is valuable only if it benefits humans or other animals. Intuitively, that seems wrong but perhaps I shouldn't trust my intuition here.
Peter Singer
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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
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The new freedom of expression brought by the Internet goes far beyond politics. People relate to each other in new ways, posing questions about how we should respond to people when all that we know about them is what we have learned through a medium that permits all kinds of anonymity and deception.
Peter Singer
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Lay off with the 'You reason, so you don't feel' stuff, please. I feel, but I also think about what I feel. When people say we should only feel I am reminded of Göring, who said 'I think with my blood.' See where it led him.
Peter Singer