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81 " But pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being "
― Peter Singer , Animal Liberation
82 " We think of lions and wolves as savage because they kill; but they must kill, or starve. Humans kill other animals for sport, to satisfy their curiosity, to beautify their bodies, and to please their palates. "
83 " Cutting out meat would do more to help combat climate change than any other action we could feasibly take in the next 20 years. "
― Peter Singer , Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter
84 " say that people are “humane” is to say that they are kind; to say that they are “beastly,” “brutal,” or simply that they behave “like animals” is to suggest that they are cruel and nasty. We rarely stop to consider that the animal who kills with the least reason to do so is the human animal. We think of lions and wolves as savage because they kill; but they must kill, or starve. Humans kill other animals for sport, to satisfy their curiosity, to beautify their bodies, and to please their palates. Human beings also kill members of their own species for greed or power. Moreover, human beings are not content with mere killing. Throughout history they have shown a tendency to torment and torture both their fellow human beings and their fellow animals before putting them to death. No other animal shows much interest in doing this. While "
85 " If our best-educated citizens have no idea how to answer these basic questions, we will struggle to build a democracy that can solve the problems we face, whether they are what to do about climate change, the world’s poor, the problems of Australia’s Indigenous people, or the prospect of a future in which we can genetically modify our offspring. An education in the humanities is as valuable today as it was in Plato’s time. "
86 " What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have. "
87 " Effective altruists do things like the following: •Living modestly and donating a large part of their income—often much more than the traditional tenth, or tithe—to the most effective charities; •Researching and discussing with others which charities are the most effective or drawing on research done by other independent evaluators; •Choosing the career in which they can earn most, not in order to be able to live affluently but so that they can do more good; •Talking to others, in person or online, about giving, so that the idea of effective altruism will spread; •Giving part of their body—blood, bone marrow, or even a kidney—to a stranger. In the following chapters, we will meet people who have done these things. "
― Peter Singer , The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically
88 " Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized. "
― Peter Singer , Marx: A Very Short Introduction
89 " For nomadic societies, there was no point in owning anything that one could not carry, but once humans settled down and developed a system of money, that limit to acquisition disappeared. "
90 " Worldwide, the poor leave a very small carbon footprint, but they will suffer the most from climate change. "
91 " So the researcher’s central dilemma exists in an especially acute form in psychology: either the animal is not like us, in which case there is no reason for performing the experiment; or else the animal is like us, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us. Another "
92 " When we eat plants, food takes on a different quality. We take from the earth food that is ready for us and does not fight against us as we take it. "
93 " If doing the most you can for others means that you are also flourishing, then that is the best possible outcome for everyone. "
94 " One might also ask why we should develop energy-intensive robots to work in one of the few areas—care for children or elderly people—in which people with little education can find employment. "
95 " If you are paying for something to drink when safe drinking water comes out of the tap, you have money to spend on things you don’t really need. "
― Peter Singer , The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty
96 " If it is so easy to help people in real need through no fault of their own, and yet we fail to do so, aren’t we doing something wrong? At a minimum, I hope this book will persuade you that there is something deeply askew with our widely accepted views about what it is to live a good life. "
97 " The world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument. "
98 " Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval scholar whose ideas became the semi-official philosophy of the Roman Catholic church, wrote that whatever we have in “superabundance”—that is, above and beyond what will reasonably satisfy our own needs and those of our family, for the present and the foreseeable future—“is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. "
99 " Christian magazine Sojourners, likes to point out that the Bible contains more than three thousand references to alleviating poverty—enough reason, he thinks, for making this a central moral issue for Christians. "
100 " 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. Most "