The Expanding Circle Quotes

“Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper.”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology

“Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology

“Whether particular people with the capacity to take an objective point of view actually do take this objective viewpoint into account when they act will depend on the strength of their desire to avoid inconsistency between the way they reason publicly and the way they act.”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress

“The Western principle of the sanctity of human life—a principle which is unique in the sharpness with which it separates the wrongness of taking the life of any human being, no matter how severely defective, from the wrongness of taking the life of any non-human animal, no matter how intelligent—can, as I have argued elsewhere, be explained as the legacy of the Judeo-Christian world view, in which humans, but not animals, are made in the image of God and have immortal souls. For those of us who do not accept the authority of the Judeo-Christian religions, this explanation should lead to a critical re-examination of our belief in the sanctity of all and only human life. One”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology

“Reason is inherently expansionist. It seeks universal application.”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology

“Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be travelled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology

“Reciprocal altruism seems not really altruism at all; it could more accurately be described as enlightened self-interest.”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology

“The moral unity to be expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a unity of tendency. . . . At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world. —W. E. H. LECKY, The History of European Morals”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress

“If our holding certain values had no effect at all on what we chose to do, values would lose all their importance. Now”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress

“Probably the best-known tenet of modern moral philosophy: the doctrine that there is an unbridgeable gulf between facts and values, between descriptions of what is and prescriptions of what ought to be.”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology

“In explaining the importance of understanding our biology, Dawkins writes; “Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something which no other species has ever aspired to.”
― Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress