Peter Singer Issues Quotations

My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues.

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.

In a situation where many national leaders do the same thing and look out for national interests, and with an issue like global warming, you're likely to get no solution, so I think you have to have some kind of ethical trump on some of those issues.

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.

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.

Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is.

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.