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
More people with HIV/Aids are getting inexpensive anti-retroviral drugs, and their life expectancy has increased, but universal access is still far off, and the disease is still spreading, if more slowly than before.
I would just like to get him to think about these things; whether what's happening in Iraq is promoting the culture of life. The worry is that he is so certain that he know where he's going to lead the country.
I might well have written a different book in some respects had I been writing it now. But I wouldn't really go back on things I had said.
Some of the things that I'm trying to do are to strengthen those other forces, and give them a better chance of having some influence.
The lack of numbers - missing on everything from how much we are spending to how many are being killed or wounded - is just stunning for this day and age.
As we realise 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.
This kind of visit is oversold; you would not have a shift in the public opinion. It's a one day story.
So the compromise itself is within ethics rather than between competing ethics, and I think that's true in geo-political concerns.
Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.
Britain has to decide whether it's trying to influence the individual or influence the environment that has allowed this radicalism to exist. The key to success is changing the environment to make radical Islam completely unacceptable. . . . It's not just draining the swamp. You have to poison the sea.
A shared set of ethical values is the glue that can hold us together during an intense crisis. A key lesson from the SARS outbreak is that fairness becomes more important during a time of crisis and confusion. And the time to consider these questions and processes in relation to a threatened major pandemic is now.
It's not going to be the individual ... technical (public health) decisions that are going to hold our society together in the face of an immense struggle with an influenza pandemic,
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.
Animals, or at least those who are conscious and capable of suffering or enjoying their lives, are not things for us to use in whatever way we find convenient.