Ethics in the Real World Quotes

“Words do have consequences, and what one generation says but does not really believe, the next generation may believe, and even act upon.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter

“Cutting out meat would do more to help combat climate change than any other action we could feasibly take in the next 20 years.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter

“If our best-educated citizens have no idea how to answer these basic questions, we will struggle to build a democracy that can solve the problems we face, whether they are what to do about climate change, the world’s poor, the problems of Australia’s Indigenous people, or the prospect of a future in which we can genetically modify our offspring. An education in the humanities is as valuable today as it was in Plato’s time.”
― Peter singer, Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter

“Worldwide, the poor leave a very small carbon footprint, but they will suffer the most from climate change.”
― peter singer, Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter

“... those who have enough to spend on luxuries, yet fail to share even a tiny fraction of their income with the poor, must bear some responsibility for the deaths they could have prevented.”
― peter singer, Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter

“We need to get over our reluctance to speak openly about the good we do. Silent giving will not change a culture that deems it sensible to spend all your money on yourself and your family, rather than to help those in greater need—even though helping others is likely to bring more fulfillment in the long run.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter

“For nomadic societies, there was no point in owning anything that one could not carry, but once humans settled down and developed a system of money, that limit to acquisition disappeared.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter

“If we could see our lives objectively, we could see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter

“If you agree that bringing someone into existence can be bad for that person and if you also accept the argument that bringing someone into existence can't be good for that person, then this leads to a strange conclusion: being born could harm you but it couldn't help you.”
― peter singer, Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter

“One might also ask why we should develop energy-intensive robots to work in one of the few areas—care for children or elderly people—in which people with little education can find employment.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 87 Brief Essays on Things that Matter

“Since 1988, Iran has had a government-funded, regulated system for purchasing kidneys.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 87 Brief Essays on Things that Matter

“hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue,”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 87 Brief Essays on Things that Matter

“We spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states. If we think that this is a tolerable state of affairs it is because we are, in Benatar’s view, victims of the illusion of pollyannaism. This illusion may have evolved because it helped our ancestors survive, but it is an illusion nonetheless. If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.”
― Peter singer , Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter

“If we think that democracy is a good thing, then we must believe that the public should know as much as possible about what the government it elects is doing. Snowden has said that he made the disclosures because “the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter

“Whaling should stop because it brings needless suffering to social, intelligent animals capable of enjoying their own lives. But against the Japanese charge of cultural bias, Western nations will have little defense until they do much more about the needless animal suffering in their own countries.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter

“Everything we get from whales can be obtained without cruelty. Causing suffering to innocent beings without an extremely weighty reason for doing so is wrong, and hence whaling is unethical.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter

“Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the founders of The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, believes that singularity will lead to an “intelligence explosion” as super-intelligent machines design even more intelligent machines, with each generation repeating this process.”
― Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter