Pain and suffering are in themselves bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the being that suffers. How bad a pain is depends on how intense it is and how long it lasts, but pain of the same intensity and duration are equally bad, whether felt by humans or animals.

Peter Singer

Categorized in : Sex Animal Pain

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

Peter Singer

encouragement nature animal

Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.

Peter Singer

infant killing sometimes

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?

Peter Singer

degrees doe animal

Of course, infanticide needs to be strictly legally controlled and rare - but it should not be ruled out, any more than abortion.

Peter Singer

abortion should needs

We should give the same respect to the lives of animals as we do to the lives of humans.

Peter Singer

should animal giving

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.

Peter Singer

adverse-effects loss happy-life

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.

Peter Singer

children past thinking

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.

Peter Singer

importance moral sacrifice

Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.

Peter Singer

religious christian animal

Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans.

Peter Singer

standards valuable animal

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.

Peter Singer

army dog animal

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.

Peter Singer

abuse animal needs

To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do what will have the best consequences for all of those affected.

Peter Singer

judging trying mean

Hebrew word for "charity" tzedakah, simply means "justice" and as this suggests, for Jews, giving to the poor is no optional extra but an essential part of living a just life.

Peter Singer

justice giving mean

What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or rational argument, that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.

Peter Singer

argument faith believe

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.

Peter Singer

race animal sex

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

Peter Singer

progress development views

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.

Peter Singer

college baby children

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

Peter Singer

vegetarian ethics animal

All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.

Peter Singer

religious lying sex