Peter Singer
I just don't think that the differences you make by donating to a museum or an art gallery really compare to the differences you make by donating to the charities that fight global poverty.
If somebody has an extreme amount of wealth and is not using it for some good purpose, only for their own enjoyment or satisfaction, then clearly there's a moral failing in the world in which we live.
I don't eat meat. I've been a vegetarian since 1971. I've gradually become increasingly vegan. I am largely vegan, but I'm a flexible vegan. I don't go to the supermarket and buy non-vegan stuff for myself. But when I'm traveling or going to other people's places, I will be quite happy to eat vegetarian rather than vegan.
When you look at food as an ethical issue in the Christian tradition, you don't find very much about it. You don't find, as you do in the Jewish or Islamic or Hindu traditions, a lot of restrictions saying you can eat this but you can't eat that.
Some vegetarians and vegans may object to in vitro meat, because they don't see the need for meat at all. That's fine for them, and of course they are free to remain vegetarians and vegans and choose not to eat in vitro meat.
Many European countries, as well as Australia, Canada, Israel, and New Zealand, have adopted legislation that creates a 'public lending right', where the government recognises that enabling hundreds of people to read a single copy of a book provides a public good, but that doing so is likely to reduce sales of the book.
Open government is, within limits, an ideal that we all share. U.S. President Barack Obama endorsed it when he took office in January 2009.
Even in non-democratic countries, people have a legitimate interest in knowing about actions taken by the government.
When diamonds' role in fuelling violent conflict in Africa gained worldwide attention, the diamond industry established the Kimberley process in order to keep "blood diamonds" out of international trade.
If we use goods made from raw materials that are obtained from a poor country without the proceeds being used to benefit the people of that country, we become complicit in a particularly iniquitous form of grand larceny.
To make sustainable progress in reducing extreme poverty will require improvements in both the quantity and quality of aid.
More people with HIV/Aids are getting inexpensive anti-retroviral drugs, and their life expectancy has increased, but universal access is still far off, and the disease is still spreading, if more slowly than before.
When I was a child, my father used to take me for walks, often along a river or by the sea. We would pass people fishing, perhaps reeling in their lines with struggling fish hooked at the end of them. Once I saw a man take a small fish out of a bucket and impale it, still wriggling, on an empty hook to use as bait.
The price we are willing to pay for safety cannot be infinite. It is distasteful to put a price on human life, but the more we spend on safety, the less we will have for our other goals.
Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm.
Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.
There is no excuse for keeping wild animals in amusement parks or circuses. Until our governments take action, we should avoid supporting places where captive wild animals perform for our amusement. If the public will not pay to see them, the businesses that profit from keeping animals captive will not be able to continue.
Robots already perform many functions, from making cars to defusing bombs - or, more menacingly, firing missiles. Children and adults play with toy robots, while vacuum-cleaning robots are sucking up dirt in a growing number of homes and - as evidenced by YouTube videos - entertaining cats.
Most of the robots being developed for home use are functional in design - Gecko's homecare robot looks rather like the Star Wars robot R2-D2. Honda and Sony are designing robots that look more like the same movie's 'android' C-3PO.
There is no doubt that the world economy is in trouble. But if governments or individuals use this as an excuse to reduce assistance to the world's poorest people, they will only multiply the seriousness of the problem for the world as a whole.
If extreme poverty is allowed to increase, it will give rise to new problems, including new diseases that will spread from countries that cannot provide adequate healthcare to those that can. Poverty will lead to more migrants seeking to move, whether legally or not, to rich nations.
You shouldn't say 'animals' to distinguish between humans and non-humans. We are all animals.
Almost everybody accepts that some people can be killed. 'The concept of 'brain death' - the belief that people on respirators can legitimately be killed - shows that.
I think I get angry when people cause serious suffering or don't alleviate suffering when they could.
Americans think they're the leader of the world and yet can say that they're putting their economic interests ahead of the lives of - quite possibly - tens of millions of people who over the next 50 years will die because of floods or storms or tropical diseases or whatever. I guess that sort of thing makes me angry.
There's a difference between early and late abortions. If you have a late abortion, where the fetus might feel pain, then I think you should have a good reason. Because then you're inflicting pain. As you go through the third trimester, you need to have more serious reasons to end a pregnancy.
Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.Collection: Sometimes
All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals.Collection: Encouragement
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?Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Sacrifice
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.Collection: Loss
Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.Collection: Christian
We should give the same respect to the lives of animals as we do to the lives of humans.Collection: Animal
The traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological and demographic developments.Collection: Views
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.Collection: Race
Of course, infanticide needs to be strictly legally controlled and rare - but it should not be ruled out, any more than abortion.Collection: 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.Collection: Animal
Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Sex
Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.Collection: Self
Every day we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements.Collection: Judgement
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.Collection: Dog
Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Empathy
Sometimes animals may suffer more because of their more limited understanding. If, for instance, we are taking prisoners in wartime we can explain to them that although they must submit to capture, search, and confinement, they will not otherwise be harmed and will be set free at the conclusion of hostilities. If we capture wild animals, however, we cannot explain that we are not threatening their lives. A wild animal cannot distinguish an attempt to overpower and confine from an attempt to kill; the one causes as much terror as the other.Collection: Animal
There are some circumstances, for example, where the newborn baby is severely disabled and where the parents think that it's better that child should not live, when killing the newborn baby is not at all wrong ... not like killing the chimpanzee would be.Collection: Baby
Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.Collection: Philosophy
By ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make so much extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.Collection: Animal