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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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Peter Singer
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: July 6
Philosopher
Politician
Professor
Writer
Melbourne
Australia
Peter Albert David Singer
Peter A. D. Singer
Free
Animals
Obey
South
Liberation
Broken
Illegal
Justifiably
Animal
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Slaves

More quotes by Peter Singer

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The Pentagon said that these prisoners were kept in accordance with the Geneva Convention, and of course I was not reassured by that, but I couldn't prove that that was wrong so we're clearer about that.
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
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Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.
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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More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.
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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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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The problem is not with the athletes, but with us. No matter how blatant the drug use may be, we don't stop watching the Tour de France. Maybe we should just turn off the television and get on our own bikes.
Peter Singer
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I don't see how anyone could really think that if you have a choice between saving the life of one person and saving the lives of a million people, to say - well, I've saved the one - can you really take that seriously? I can't.
Peter Singer
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We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.
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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Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the slippery slope: once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die.
Peter Singer
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If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.
Peter Singer
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If we're going to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots. … If we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little.
Peter Singer
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So why don't we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required - we could party our way into extinction!
Peter Singer
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Bush sees the evil as out there in the wider world, residing in people who 'hate freedom'. Look at his immediate response to the pictures of prisoner abuse this is not what Americans do, these are not our values.
Peter Singer
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What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
Peter Singer
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If you're buying animal products and can go to the farm and actually see how the animals are looked after, yes, that's an important point. That's definitely the best way of assuring yourself that the animals are being well treated.
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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Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans.
Peter Singer