Latest Peter Singer Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• My major concern about leaving enhancement to the marketplace is that then the rich will be able to buy themselves genetically superior children and the poor will not - sharpening the class divisions we have now. That problem could be overcome if, genetic enhancement were available to all, subsidized by the state - and that would, over time, have benefits for society as well.

  Peter Singer

  Children, Leaving, Overcoming

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• According to classical utilitarianism, the only intrinsic good is happiness; the only intrinsic bad is pain. That implies no intrinsic value in preserving nature, that preserving an endangered plant is valuable only if it benefits humans or other animals. Intuitively, that seems wrong but perhaps I shouldn't trust my intuition here.

  Peter Singer

  Pain, Animal, Intuition

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• After 9/11, the American Red Cross received more than half a billion dollars in donations to help the victims of the terrorist attacks. The families of the victims were already well-provided for by various government funds, so Red Cross simply drew a line across lower Manhattan and offered everyone there financial assistance, whether they needed it or not.

  Peter Singer

  Helping, Financial, Donation

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• I know of a number of people who are successfully earning to give. That isn't for everyone but for those with the ability to earn a lot of money and the character to resist the temptation to spend it on themselves, it can be a great way to do good.

  Peter Singer

  Character, Giving, People

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• There is an obvious evolutionary explanation for the scarcity of altruistic saints: Without a strong predilection for their own interests, our ancestors would have been unlikely to survive, reproduce, and give their own offspring a chance of doing the same. Now conditions have changed and for most of us, surviving and reproducing isn't such a struggle but we still carry the genes of our ancestors and they influence - not determine, but influence - our behavior.

  Peter Singer

  Strong, Struggle, Giving

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• There are many cases in which gifted children have done great things without special school programs. There are also gifted kids who have been to special schools and achieved nothing that has benefited the world as a whole. Without solid evidence, I have no confidence that funding school programs for the intellectually gifted would do more good than the most cost-effective programs to help people in extreme poverty.

  Peter Singer

  Children, School, Kids

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• We certainly would resolve the problems of the charities that are working in areas where they can do the most good. So if you consider that the U.S. foreign aid budget is 30 billion, yes, we could make a major contribution to reducing global poverty, start to deal much better with some of the other big environmental problems that the world faces. So I think we could solve a lot of problems.

  Peter Singer

  Thinking, Environmental, World

  Source: www.npr.org

• If you have the abilities to earn a lot of money and if you have the character to persist in giving that to the most effective charities you can find, then that may be the best thing that you can do. And - also, if you do become a Wall Street banker, I think you need to be aware of what you're doing in terms of your daily work, not just earning money to give a lot away. But you need to think about - am I harming people through the work that I'm doing?

  Peter Singer

  Wall, Character, Thinking

  Source: www.npr.org

• Looking back on my career, I think I've been extremely fortunate to be in the right place at the right time in order to have the influence that I did.

  Peter Singer

  Thinking, Influence, Right Time

  Source: www.npr.org

• Effective altruism is the form of altruism in which we bring our rational capacities to bear in order to do the most good that we can.

  Peter Singer

  Rational, Altruism

  Source: www.npr.org

• I'd much rather be part of a society which greatly honors and respects people who are altruists and who are effective in their altruism, than one that either admires people because they're, you know, celebrity movie stars or because they're super wealthy just no matter what they do with their wealth because I think we ought to try to encourage more people to act in that way.

  Peter Singer

  Thinking, People, Honor

  Source: www.npr.org

• Charitable giving is a huge sector in the United States. It amounts to $350 billion a year. And yet, I can't help feeling that a lot of that is wasted because people have not been thinking about how to do it as effectively as possible.

  Peter Singer

  Thinking, People, Giving

  Source: www.npr.org

• Take for example providing a guide dog for a blind person. That's a good thing to do, right? All right. It is a good thing to do. But you have to think what else you could do with the resources. It costs about $40,000 to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person. It costs somewhere between 20 and $50 to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma. So you do the sums, and you could provide one guide dog for one blind American or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness.

  Peter Singer

  Country, Dog, Thinking

  "Peter Singer: How Can We Be More Effective Altruists?". "TED Radio Hour" with Guy Raz, www.npr.org. May 26, 2017.

• Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need. You could take the money you're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization the Against Malaria Foundation which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets to protect children. And we know reliably that if we provide nets, they're used, and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria. Fortunately more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement effective altruism.

  Peter Singer

  Children, People, Giving

  Source: www.npr.org

• I don't see how anyone could really think that if you have a choice between saving the life of one person and saving the lives of a million people, to say - well, I've saved the one - can you really take that seriously? I can't.

  Peter Singer

  Thinking, People, Choices

  Source: www.npr.org

• Somebody who eats twice as much factory-farmed products as he or she needs to is clearly doing twice as much damage to the planet. From a utilitarian point of view, that's twice as bad.

  Peter Singer

  Views, Needs, Damage

  "Chew the Right Thing". Interview with Dave Gilson, www.motherjones.com. May 3, 2006.

• When you look at food as an ethical issue in the Christian tradition, you don't find very much about it. You don't find, as you do in the Jewish or Islamic or Hindu traditions, a lot of restrictions saying you can eat this but you can't eat that. But what you do find is the idea that gluttony is a sin and that it's something that we ought to be ashamed of.

  Peter Singer

  Christian, Islamic, Ethical Issues

  "Chew the Right Thing". Interview with Dave Gilson, www.motherjones.com. May 3, 2006.

• I don't understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It's a pretty gross interference with nature. I think it ought to be governed by the standards of how it affects the individual animals, just as we'd want to deal with institutions that deal with humans by how they affect individual humans.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Thinking, Want

  "Chew the Right Thing". Interview with Dave Gilson, www.motherjones.com. May 3, 2006.

• History is not going to look kindly on us if we just keep our head in the sand on armed autonomous robotics issue because it sounds too science fiction.

  Peter Singer

  Issues, Looks, Fiction

• My fear is that that's what's going to happen with robotics and the military. Importantly, this discussion has to involve not just the scientists, but also the political scientists. It's got to be a multidisciplinary discussion. You can't have it be another repeat of what happened with the people working on the atomic bomb.

  Peter Singer

  Military, People, Political

• There are a lot of weapons that we've developed which we've pulled back from - biological weapons, chemical weapons, etc. This may be the case with armed autonomous robotics, where we ultimately pull back from them.

  Peter Singer

  May, Weapons, Etc

  "Peter W. Singer’s Killer Robots". Interview with Eric Stoner, www.motherjones.com. January 29, 2009.

• Sci-fi is often a metaphor. I think it's more the themes and questions that science fiction raises rather than the exact predictions that should guide us.

  Peter Singer

  Thinking, Fiction, Metaphor

• We wait until Pandora's box is opened before we say, "Wow, maybe we should understand what's in that box." This is the story of humans on every problem.

  Peter Singer

  Waiting, Stories, Wow

  "Peter W. Singer’s Killer Robots". Interview with Eric Stoner, www.motherjones.com. January 29, 2009.

• In my world of the people who study war and defense issues, we simply did not talk about robotics. We do not talk about it because it's seen as mere science fiction. It's cold, hard, metallic reality.

  Peter Singer

  War, Reality, Issues

  "Peter W. Singer’s Killer Robots". Interview with Eric Stoner, www.motherjones.com. January 29, 2009.