Peter Singer Quotes About Ethics

Quotes about: Ethics

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

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Ethics, Vegetarian

  Jim Mason, Peter Singer (1980). “Animal Factories”, Crown

• I think ethics is always there; it's not always a very thoughtful or reflective ethics.

  Peter Singer

  Sadness, Thoughtful, Thinking

• We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.

  Peter Singer

  Views, Talking, Ethics

• I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.

  Peter Singer

  Thinking, Issues, Intuition

• If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering - insofar as rough comparisons can be made - of any other being. So the limit of sentience is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. To mark this boundary by some other characteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in an arbitrary manner. Why not choose some other characteristic, like skin color?

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Skin Color, Suffering

• Pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being that suffers is not a member of our own species.

  Peter Singer

  Pain, Animal, Suffering

• We don't usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting people - these acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. In ancient Greece and Rome, ethical choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices about sex.

  Peter Singer

  Hurt, Sex, Lying

  Peter Singer, Jim Mason (2007). “The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter”, p.3, Rodale

• That's a central part of philosophy, of ethics. What do I owe to strangers? What do I owe to my family? What is it to live a good life? Those are questions which we face as individuals.

  Peter Singer

  Good Life, Philosophy, Faces

• More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.

  Peter Singer

  Ethics, Compromise, Expediency

• Interest in business ethics courses has surged, and student activities at leading business schools are more focused than ever before on making business serve long-term social values.

  Peter Singer

  School, Social Values, Long

  "Putting ethics before profits" by Peter Singer, www.theguardian.com. June 21, 2009.

• Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing.

  Peter Singer

  Nursing, Engineering, Law

  "Putting ethics before profits" by Peter Singer, www.theguardian.com. June 21, 2009.

• At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.

  Peter Singer

  Mean, Thinking, Ethical Principles

• It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about this responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.

  Peter Singer

  Lying, Roots, Mammals

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.11, Princeton University Press

• Ethics is inescapable.

  Peter Singer

  Ethics

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.15, Princeton University Press

• The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.

  Peter Singer

  Principles, Ethics, Social

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.149, Princeton University Press

• The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.

  Peter Singer

  Taken, Goal, May

  Peter Singer (1982). “The expanding circle: ethics and sociobiology”, Plume

• Ethics seems a morass which we have to cross, but get hopelessly bogged in when we make the attempt.

  Peter Singer

  Ethics, Crosses, Seems

  Peter Singer (1982). “The expanding circle: ethics and sociobiology”, Plume

• I don't think there's anything in the compromise that means that there's a clash of ethics.

  Peter Singer

  Mean, Thinking, Ethics

• The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.

  Peter Singer

  Running, Ideas, People

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.27, Princeton University Press

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