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" There is a new wave of interest in exploring how to frame choices so that people make better decisions. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, professors of economics and law, respectively, teamed up to write Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which advocates using defaults to nudge us to make better choices.9 Even when we are choosing in our own interests, we often choose unwisely. When employees have the option of participating in a retirement-savings scheme, many do not, despite the financial advantages of doing so. If their employer instead automatically enrolls them, giving them the choice of opting out, participation jumps dramatically "
― Peter Singer , The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty
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" For example, in many developing countries, children, and in particular girls, do not spend enough time at school, even when school is free, to learn as they should. To change this, the following strategies have been suggested: •Unconditional cash transfers for girls; •Cash transfers for girls, conditional on attendance; •Merit scholarships for girls; •Free primary school uniforms; •Deworming through primary schools; •Providing information to parents about the increased wages of those who stay at school. All of these strategies look plausible. When resources for education are scarce, as they always are, especially in developing countries, which one should be tried? In the absence of randomized testing, it would be impossible to know. But the Jameel Poverty Action Lab has tested them and found that the last one on the list is by far the most cost-effective. Every $100 spent on providing information to parents about the increased wages of those who stay at school results in an amazing 20.7 additional years spent at school! Deworming through primary schools is also highly cost-effective, leading to 13.9 additional years spent at school per $100 spent. Of the remaining interventions, the first two are relatively ineffective, both gaining less than 1 additional year per $100, and the cash transfers, whether conditional or unconditional, gain less than one-tenth of an additional year per $100.8 The most effective method thus results in more than two hundred times the benefits of the two least effective methods, which means that for every $100 spent on one of the least effective methods, $99.50 is wasted. When resources are limited and education is so important to the future of children, that waste means that many human beings do not achieve their full potential. "
― Peter Singer , The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically
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" The Western principle of the sanctity of human life—a principle which is unique in the sharpness with which it separates the wrongness of taking the life of any human being, no matter how severely defective, from the wrongness of taking the life of any non-human animal, no matter how intelligent—can, as I have argued elsewhere, be explained as the legacy of the Judeo-Christian world view, in which humans, but not animals, are made in the image of God and have immortal souls. For those of us who do not accept the authority of the Judeo-Christian religions, this explanation should lead to a critical re-examination of our belief in the sanctity of all and only human life. One "
― Peter Singer , The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology
