Practical Ethics Quotes

“To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“As far as food is concerned, the great extravagance is not caviar or truffles, but beef, pork and poultry. Some 38 percent of the world's grain crop is now fed to animals, as well as large quantities of soybeans. There are three times as many domestic animals on this planet as there are human beings. The combined weight of the world's 1.28 billion cattle alone exceeds that of the human population. While we look darkly at the number of babies being born in poorer parts of the world, we ignore the over-population of farm animals, to which we ourselves contribute...[t]hat, however, is only part of the damage done by the animals we deliberately breed. The energy intensive factory farming methods of the industrialised nations are responsible for the consumption of huge amounts of fossil fuels. Chemical fertilizers, used to grow the feed crops for cattle in feedlots and pigs and chickens kept indoors in sheds, produce nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. Then there is the loss of forests. Everywhere, forest-dwellers, both human and non-human, can be pushed out. Since 1960, 25 percent of the forests of Central America have been cleared for cattle. Once cleared, the poor soils will support grazing for a few years; then the graziers must move on. Shrub takes over the abandoned pasture, but the forest does not return. When the forests are cleared so the cattle can graze, billions of tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Finally, the world's cattle are thought to produce about 20 percent of the methane released into the atmosphere, and methane traps twenty-five times as much heat from the sun as carbon dioxide. Factory farm manure also produces methane because, unlike manured dropped naturally in the fields, it dies not decompose in the presence of oxygen. All of this amounts to a compelling reason...for a plant based diet.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Arguments for preservation based on the beauty of wilderness are sometimes treated as if they were of little weight because they are "merely aesthetic". That is a mistake. We go to great lengths to preserve the artistic treasures of earlier human civilisations. It is difficult to imagine any economic gain that we would be prepared to accept as adequate compensation for, for instance, the destruction of the paintings in the Louvre. How should we compare the aesthetic value of wilderness with that of the paintings in the Louvre? Here, perhaps, judgment does become inescapably subjective; so I shall report my own experiences. I have looked at the paintings in the Louvre, and in many of the other great galleries of Europe and the United States. I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts; yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that they are filled when I walk in a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking a forested valley, or by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set amongst tall tree-ferns, growing in the shade of the forest canopy, I do not think I am alone in this; for many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation, rising to an almost mystical intensity.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Helping is not, as conventionally thought, a charitable act that is praiseworthy to do but not wrong to omit. It is something that everyone ought to do.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“If our life has no meaning other than our own happiness, we are likely to find that when we have obtained what we think we need to be happy, happiness itself still eludes us.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own beliefs so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among them.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Why [..] should the boundary of sacrosanct life match the boundary of our species?”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Pacifists have usually regarded the use of violence as absolutely wrong, irrespective of its consequences. This, like other ‘no matter what’ prohibitions, assumes the validity of the distinction between acts and omissions. Without this distinction, pacifists who refuse to use violence when it is the only means of preventing greater violence would be responsible for the greater violence they fail to prevent.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Voluntary euthanasia occurs only when, to the best of medical knowledge, a person is suffering from an incurable and painful or extremely distressing condition. In these circumstances one cannot say that to choose to die quickly is obviously irrational.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2001, as died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow.”
― Singer, Practical Ethics

“An area of land used for crops will feed about ten times as many people as the same area of land used for grass-fed beef.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“We have no obligation to assist countries whose governments have policies that will undermine the effectiveness of our aid.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Laws and a settled decision procedure to generate them are a good thing. This gives us one important reason for obeying the law. By obeying the law, I can contribute to the respect in which the established decision procedure and the laws are held. By disobeying, I set an example to others that may lead them to disobey too.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week’s toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths — and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“This change of perspective makes it apparent that the ‘Pro Life’ or ‘Right to Life’ movement is misnamed. Those who protest against abortion but dine regularly on the bodies of chickens, pigs and calves can hardly claim to have concern for ‘life’ as such. Their concern about embryos and fetuses suggests only a biased concern for the lives of members of our own species. On any fair comparison of morally relevant characteristics, like rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, autonomy, pleasure and pain and so on, the calf, the pig and the much derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy – whereas if we make the comparison with an embryo, or a fetus of less than three months, a fish shows much more awareness.”
― Singer, Practical Ethics

“Legal, regulated voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide have far less potential for abuse, and when they are available, there is no need to make it easy for people to find out how to kill themselves.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“I have not attempted to cover all aspects of the ethics of in vitro fertilization and embryo experimentation. To do that, it would be necessary to investigate several other issues, including the appropriateness of allocating scarce medical resources to this area at a time when the world has a serious problem of overpopulation. Further uses of IVF, such as donating or selling embryos to others, employing a surrogate to bear the child, using IVF to enable older women to have children (in 2008, a 70-year-old Indian woman used the technique to become the oldest woman reliably recorded as having had a child), or selecting from among a number of embryos for the one that meets some criteria of genetic desirability, raise separate ethical issues.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Our own happiness, therefore, is a by-product of aiming at something else and is not to be obtained by setting our sights on happiness alone.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Many people who think nothing of buying factory-farmed ham or chicken from a supermarket are quick to condemn hunting; yet hunting is more defensible than factory farming.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“In some parts of the world, what you are doing is already apparent. According to the World Health Organization, the warming of the planet caused an additional 140,000 deaths in 2004, as compared with the number of deaths there would have been had average global temperatures remained as they were during the period 1961 to 1990. This means that climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occurred in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“An environmental ethic rejects the ideals of a materialist society in which success is gauged by the number of consumer goods one can accumulate. Instead, it judges success in terms of the development of one's abilities and the achievement of real fulfilment and satisfaction.”
― Singer, Practical Ethics

“When he had cancer and knew that the end was not far away, I asked him what had driven him to spend his life working for others. He replied: I guess basically one wants to feel that one's life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one's done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: what greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Some people find collecting stamps or following their favourite football team an entirely adequate way of giving purpose to their lives. There is nothing irrational about that; but others again seek something more significant as they become more aware of their situation in the world and more reflective about their purposes. To this third group, the ethical point of view offers a meaning and purpose in life that one does not grow out of. At least, one cannot grow out of the ethical point of view until all ethical tasks have been accomplished. If that utopia were ever achieved, our purposive nature might well leave us dissatisfied, much as egoists might be dissatisfied when they have everything they need to be happy.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Yet it matches our everyday observations and is consistent with our nature as evolved, purposive beings. Human beings survive and reproduce themselves through purposive action. We obtain happiness and fulfillment by working towards and achieving our goals. In evolutionary terms, we could say that happiness functions as an internal reward for our achievements. Subjectively, we regard achieving the goal (or progressing towards it) as a reason for happiness. Our own happiness, therefore, is a by-product of aiming at something else and is not to be obtained by setting our sights on happiness alone.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“The question cannot be dealt with by invoking the simplistic formula: ‘The end never justifies the means.’ For all but the strictest adherent of an ethic of rules, the end sometimes does justify the means. Most people think that lying is wrong, other things being equal, yet consider it right to lie in order to avoid causing unnecessary offence or embarrassment.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“The question cannot be dealt with by invoking the simplistic formula: ‘The end never justifies the means.’ For all but the strictest adherent of an ethic of rules, the end sometimes does justify the means. Most people think that lying is wrong, other things being equal, yet consider it right to lie in order to avoid causing unnecessary offence or embarrassment –”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Because of what the rich nations are doing, lands that now grow crops will become barren, glaciers that for millennia have fed rivers will dwindle, the sea will take over fertile fields, tropical diseases will spread, and people will starve or become refugees. For at least the past twenty years, the rich countries have known that their actions risk causing these effects; and from some time in the first decade of the twenty-first century, they have known that their actions very probably will have these effects. The fact that these harms are an unwanted but unavoidable side effect of pursuing otherwise innocuous goals, like giving people the kind of lifestyle they desire, is no justification for causing such harms. According to the doctrine of double effect, knowingly causing harm can be justified if the harm is not intended, the goal is sufficiently important to outweigh the harm caused, and there is no other way of achieving the goal without causing at least as great a harm. In the case of global warming, however, the reverse is the case: the harm caused far outweighs the good obtained.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“Yet causing imperceptible harm at a distance by the release of waste gases is a completely new form of harm, and so we lack any kind of instinctive inhibitions or emotional response against causing it. We have trouble seeing it as harm at all.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics