Peter Singer
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer, ACis an Australian moral philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book, Animal Liberation, a canonical text in animal liberation theory, and his essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, a key text...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth6 July 1946
CountryAustralia
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.
There is a growing movement called effective altruism. It's important because it combines both the heart and the head.
We should aim for our children to be good people, and to live ethical lives that manifest concern for others as well as for themselves.
The most callous, stupid things were done just because regulations required them...It was not until 1983, for example, that U.S. federal agencies stated that substances known to be caustic irritants such as lye, ammonia, and oven cleaners, did not need to be tested on the eyes of conscious rabbits.
An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would be justifiable.
Can we really believe that we are living a good life, an ethically decent life if we don't do anything serious to help reduce poverty around the world and help save the lives of children or adults who are likely to die if we don't increase the amount of aid we are giving.
Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.
In my world of the people who study war and defense issues, we simply did not talk about robotics. We do not talk about it because it's seen as mere science fiction. It's cold, hard, metallic reality.
The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.
If governments did not mislead their citizens so often, there would be less need for secrecy, and if leaders knew they could not rely on keeping the public in the dark about what they are doing, they would have a powerful incentive to behave better.
In appropriate circumstances we are justified in using humans to achieve goals (or the goal of assisting animals).
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.
I don't understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It's a pretty gross interference with nature. I think it ought to be governed by the standards of how it affects the individual animals, just as we'd want to deal with institutions that deal with humans by how they affect individual humans.
The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.