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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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Peter Singer
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: July 6
Philosopher
Politician
Professor
Writer
Melbourne
Australia
Peter Albert David Singer
Peter A. D. Singer
Saws
Controlling
Equal
Irrational
System
Construction
Society
Task
Free
Insight
Wasteful
Difficult
Realized
Marx
Stills
Tasks
Valid
Still
Capitalism
Controls

More quotes by 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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Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing.
Peter Singer
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If you go back in time you'll find tribes that were essentially only concerned with their own tribal members. If you were a member of another tribe, you could be killed with impunity.
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If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?
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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.
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I don't think there's anything in the compromise that means that there's a clash of ethics.
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.
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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.
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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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Pain and suffering are in themselves bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the being that suffers. How bad a pain is depends on how intense it is and how long it lasts, but pain of the same intensity and duration are equally bad, whether felt by humans or animals.
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Knowing that we can control our own behaviour makes it more likely that we will.
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Ethics is inescapable.
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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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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.
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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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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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We are not especially 'interested in' animals. Neither of us had ever been inordinately fond of dogs, cats, or horses in the way that many people are. We didn't 'love' animals.
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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.
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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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Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong.
Peter Singer