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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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Peter Singer
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: July 6
Philosopher
Politician
Professor
Writer
Melbourne
Australia
Peter Albert David Singer
Peter A. D. Singer
Make
Differences
Morally
Think
Away
Relevant
Thinking
Past
Street
Doe
Walking
Matter
Dying
Children
Streets
Every
Difference
Really
Thousand
Nineteen

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.
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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.
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Those who purchase meat, fur, and leather have no right to be shielded from the sights and sounds of the slaughterhouses from which these products were produced.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.
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Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong.
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