Peter Singer Quotes on Virtue
Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and Practical Ethics (1979, third edition 2011) gave late twentieth-century moral philosophy its most influential applied utilitarianism and the modern animal-rights and effective-altruism movements their philosophical foundation. The central commitment — that the equal consideration of comparable interests is the fundamental principle of morality, and that sentience rather than species membership is therefore the morally relevant criterion for inclusion in the moral community — drives the systematic application of preference-utilitarian reasoning across the practical domains the book addresses (animal use, abortion, euthanasia, global poverty, environmental ethics). The framework, drawing on Bentham, Sidgwick, and Hare’s universal prescriptivism, shaped the contemporary applied-ethics curriculum and the effective-altruism movement that grew up around Singer’s later work on global poverty.
Quotes
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“All animals are equal: the principle of equality requires that suffering be considered equally with the like suffering of any other being.”
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. -
“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.”
Famine, Affluence, and Morality -
Attributed to Peter Singer:
“An ethical life is one in which we identify ourselves with other, larger goals.”
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“The evidence of our own eyes makes it more plausible to believe that the world was not created by any god at all. If, however, we insist on believing in divine creation, we are forced to admit that the god who made the world cannot be all-powerful and all good. He must be either evil or a bungler.”
The God of Suffering? Project Syndicate , 2008 -
“Speciesism is an attitude of prejudice towards beings because they're not members of our species, so just as racism means that you're prejudiced against beings who are not members of your race and sexism means you're prejudiced against people of the other sex. So we humans tend to be speciesist in we think that any being that is a member of the species homo sapien just automatically has a higher moral status and is more important than any being that is a member of any other species, irrespective of the actual characteristics of those beings.”
Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews - Richard Dawkins , 2009.