Peter Singer Quotes

Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.

All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals.

If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.

The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.

Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.

We should give the same respect to the lives of animals as we do to the lives of humans.

To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do what will have the best consequences for all of those affected.

If we all think only of our own interests, we are headed for collective disaster - just look at what we are doing to our planet's climate.

The traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological and demographic developments.

Every day we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements.

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.

Of course, infanticide needs to be strictly legally controlled and rare - but it should not be ruled out, any more than abortion.

Becoming a vegan is a sure way of completely avoiding participation in the abuse of farmed animals. Vegans are a living demonstration of the fact that we do not need to exploit animals for food.

Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans.

Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.

Nineteen thousand children [are] dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference.

Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.

Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.

People tend to care about dogs because they generally have more experience with dogs as companions; but other animals are as capable of suffering as dogs are. Few people feel sympathy for rats. Yet rats are intelligent animals, and there can be no doubt that rats are capable of suffering and do suffer from countless painful experiments performed on them. If the army were to stop experiments on dogs and switch to rats instead, we should not be any less concerned.

What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or rational argument, that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.

Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.

The future of the world depends on how well we meet it.

Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.