Peter Singer Quotes on Mind

Quotes

• Attributed to Peter Singer:

  “The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all.”

• “To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed... It's had effects around the margins, of course, but they have mostly been minor. When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time the sixties still existed for us. It looked as if real changes were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one of them. All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald's to see how successful I have been.”

  Quoted by Michael Specter on the impact of the book Animal Liberation , " The Dangerous Philosopher ", The New Yorker , 6 September 1999.

• “The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.”

  The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress(1981) | Chapter 4, Reason, p. 88

• “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 traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.”

  The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress(1981) | Chapter 4, Reason, p. 88

• “Speciesism —the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term—is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.”

  Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals(1975) | Ch. 1: All Animals Are Equal

• “the fact that no one has come up with a really convincing reason for giving greater moral weight to members of our own species, simply because they are members of our species, strongly suggests that there is no such reason. Like racism and sexism, speciesism is wrong.”

  The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics(2017) | p. 343