Peter Singer
FameRank: 6

"Peter Albert David Singer", Order of Australia/AC is an Australian moral philosopher. He is currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a Secularity/secular, utilitarianism/utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book, Animal Liberation (book)/Animal Liberation (1975), a canonical text in animal rights/liberation theory. For most his career, he supported preference utilitarianism, but in his later years became a Utilitarianism#Classical utilitarianism/classical or hedonistic utilitarian, when co-authoring The Point of View of the Universe with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek.

If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous philosophers! More Peter Singer on Wikipedia.

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

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

This kind of visit is oversold; you would not have a shift in the public opinion. It's a one day story.

It's not going to be the individual ... technical (public health) decisions that are going to hold our society together in the face of an immense struggle with an influenza pandemic.

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

A shared set of ethical values is the glue that can hold us together during an intense crisis. A key lesson from the SARS outbreak is that fairness becomes more important during a time of crisis and confusion. And the time to consider these questions and processes in relation to a threatened major pandemic is now.

Britain has to decide whether it's trying to influence the individual or influence the environment that has allowed this radicalism to exist. The key to success is changing the environment to make radical Islam completely unacceptable. . . . It's not just draining the swamp. You have to poison the sea.

It's going to be a shared set of values, a shared ethical framework that's going to be the glue that will hold together societies struggling with enormously difficult choices.

The lack of numbers - missing on everything from how much we are spending to how many are being killed or wounded - is just stunning for this day and age.