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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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Peter Singer
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: July 6
Philosopher
Politician
Professor
Writer
Melbourne
Australia
Peter Albert David Singer
Peter A. D. Singer
Equality
Treat
Treats
Beings
Alleged
Among
Prescription
Animal
Prescriptions
Human
Description
Humans
Actual

More quotes by Peter Singer

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Of course, infanticide needs to be strictly legally controlled and rare - but it should not be ruled out, any more than abortion.
Peter Singer
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Knowing that we can control our own behaviour makes it more likely that we will.
Peter Singer
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We don't usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting people - these acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. In ancient Greece and Rome, ethical choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices about sex.
Peter Singer
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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
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Of those who die from avoidable, poverty-related causes, nearly 10 million, according to UNICEF, are children under five. They die from diseases such as measles, diarrhoea, and malaria that are easy and inexpensive to treat or prevent.
Peter Singer
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The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.
Peter Singer
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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
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Today, if you have an Internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world's greatest libraries - indeed, in most respects what is available through the Internet dwarfs those libraries, and it is incomparably easier to find what you need.
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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I think ethics is always there it's not always a very thoughtful or reflective ethics.
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
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Charitable giving is a huge sector in the United States. It amounts to $350 billion a year. And yet, I can't help feeling that a lot of that is wasted because people have not been thinking about how to do it as effectively as possible.
Peter Singer
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Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.
Peter Singer
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Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong.
Peter Singer
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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
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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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Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.
Peter Singer
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Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.
Peter Singer
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The belief that the animals exist because God created them - and that he created them so we can better meet our needs - is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all.
Peter Singer
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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