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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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Peter Singer
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: July 6
Philosopher
Politician
Professor
Writer
Melbourne
Australia
Peter Albert David Singer
Peter A. D. Singer
Importance
Members
Suffers
Animal
Preventing
Suffering
Diminish
Pain
Unnecessary
Doe
Member
Ethics
Species

More quotes by Peter Singer

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Should one break in and free the animals? That is illegal, but the obligation to obey the law is not absolute. It was justifiably broken by those who helped runaway slaves in the American South, to mention only one possible parallel.
Peter Singer
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So, basically, my view is I don't want to support the exploitation of animals, and within reason, I will do what I can to avoid it, but it's not like it's a religion for me. It's not like I consider I'm polluted if somehow some bit of milk or cheese or something passes my lips.
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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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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Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.
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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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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Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.
Peter Singer
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We should give the same respect to the lives of animals as we do to the lives of humans.
Peter Singer
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If we are concerned about the exploitation of human workers in countries with low standards of worker protection, we should also be concerned about the treatment of even more defenceless non-human animals.
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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We wait until Pandora's box is opened before we say, Wow, maybe we should understand what's in that box. This is the story of humans on every problem.
Peter Singer
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Nineteen thousand children [are] dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference.
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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Why...is the hunter who shoots a deer for venison subject to more criticism than the person who buys a ham at the supermarket? Overall, it is probably the intensively reared pig who has suffered more.
Peter Singer
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There can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine.
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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All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals.
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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Somebody who eats twice as much factory-farmed products as he or she needs to is clearly doing twice as much damage to the planet. From a utilitarian point of view, that's twice as bad.
Peter Singer