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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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Peter Singer
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: July 6
Philosopher
Politician
Professor
Writer
Melbourne
Australia
Peter Albert David Singer
Peter A. D. Singer
Needs
Legally
Ruled
Strictly
Controlled
Abortion
Rare
Courses
Course
Infanticide

More quotes by 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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Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.
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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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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 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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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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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
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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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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.
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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In the sense that you're not at the centre of power, like a president or prime minister of a major power, everyone is marginalised my position doesn't isn't unique in that respect. I think there are different sorts of relevance in different contexts.
Peter Singer
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If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.
Peter Singer
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I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.
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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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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Becoming a vegan is a sure way of completely avoiding participation in the abuse of farmed animals. Vegans are a living demonstration of the fact that we do not need to exploit animals for food.
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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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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As we realize that more and more things have global impact, I think we're going to get people increasingly wanting to get away from a purely national interest.
Peter Singer