Peter Singer
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, One World, The President of Good and Evil, and editor of In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave.
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2010-01-04
| We are not yet far into 2010, but studies show that fewer than half of those who make New Year’s resolutions manage to keep them for as long as one month. But there are steps that you can take to increase your chances of succeeding.... read |
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2009-12-14
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If machines can and do become conscious, will we take their feelings into account? The development of a conscious robot that (who?) was not widely perceived to have moral standing and interests worthy of consideration could lead to mistreatment on a large scale.... read |
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2009-12-07
| Barack Obama’s administration spent much of 2009 preoccupied domestically with the political fight to extend health insurance to the millions of Americans who have none. Every other developed country provides universal health insurance, but the US debate highlights an issue that will worry almost all of them in 2010 and beyond: the struggle to control health-care costs.... read |
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2009-11-13
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Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the “slippery slope”: once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die. There is no evidence for this claim, but recent revelations about what took place in a New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina point to a genuine danger from a different source.... read |
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2009-10-14
| What we are doing to our planet, to our children and grandchildren, and to the poor, by our heedless production of greenhouse gases, is one of the great moral wrongs of our age. On October 24, people in countries around the world will stand up against this injustice. ... read |
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2009-08-31
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When should we forgive or show mercy to wrongdoers? Three recent cases - the compassionate release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the reinstatement of American football player Michael Vick, and the first public expression of remorse by former Lt. William Calley, who in 1968 ordered the My Lai massacre - give ample reason to contemplate that question.... read |
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2009-08-14
| The arrest in New York last month of Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn businessman whom police allege tried to broker a deal to buy a kidney, coincided with the passage of a law in Singapore that some say will open the way for organ trading there. Would legalizing the market for human body parts exploit the poor, or should the poor be free to choose?... read |
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2009-07-14
| In April, Germany’s parliament placed limits on the use of genetic diagnosis by insurers and employers. But many of the new law's provisions will be unenforceable in the absence of an international agreement, and some of them, by banning outright embryonic and pre-natal screening for genetic diseases, are ethically absurd.... read |
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2009-06-15
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In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, the economist Milton Friedman wrote that any business has only one social responsibility: "to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game." But that view is now being replaced with a vision of business management as an ethics-driven profession.... read |
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The Value of a Pale Blue Dot
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Peter Singer 
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This year, the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of a telescope, has been declared the International Year of Astronomy. The goal of the commemoration – to help the world’s citizens “rediscover their place in the universe” – now has the incidental benefit of distracting us from nasty things nearer to home, like swine flu and the global financial crisis.... read
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2006-01-04
| Is religion necessary for morality? Many people consider it outrageous, even blasphemous, to deny the divine origin of morality. Either some divine being crafted our moral sense, or we picked it up from the teachings of organized religion. Either way, we need religion to curb nature’s vices. Paraphrasing Katherine Hepburn in the movie The African Queen, religion allows us to rise above wicked old Mother Nature, handing us a moral compass.... read |
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2006-01-18
| Earlier this month it was reported that, at the request of China’s rulers, Microsoft shut down the Web site of a Chinese blogger that was maintained on a Microsoft service called MSN Spaces. The blogger, Zhao Jing, had been reporting on a strike by journalists at The Beijing News that followed the dismissal of the newspaper’s independent-minded editor.... read |
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2005-11-10
| Fifty years ago, American chicken farmers found that by keeping their birds in sheds they could produce chickens for the table more cheaply and with less work than by traditional farmyard methods. The new method spread: chickens disappeared from fields into long, windowless sheds. Factory farming was born. ... read |
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2005-12-20
| What appeared to be the most momentous scientific advance of 2005 is currently under siege. In June, the prestigious journal Science published an article by the South Korean scientist Woo-Suk Hwang and an international team of co-authors describing how they had developed what were, in effect, “made to order” lines of human stem cells cloned from an adult. Although the scientific validity of their research is now the subject of several separate investigations, it is no less important to examine its ethical implications.... read |
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2006-04-18
| Marks & Spencer, a supermarket and clothing chain with 400 stores throughout Britain, recently announced that it is converting its entire range of coffee and tea, totaling 38 lines, to Fairtrade, a marketing symbol of “ethical production.” The chain already sells only Fairtrade tea and coffee in its 200 Café Revive coffee shops. It is also boosting its purchases of shirts and other goods made with Fairtrade cotton. The announcement came during “Fairtrade Fortnight,” a two-week promotion of Fairtrade products that included speaking tours by farmers from developing countries, telling Britons how Fairtrade has assisted their communities. ... read |
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2006-02-13
| In August 2001, President George W. Bush told Americans that he worried about “a culture that devalues life,” and that he believed that, as President of the United States, he has “an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world.”... read |
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2006-03-01
| The timing of Austria’s conviction and imprisonment of David Irving for denying the Holocaust could not have been worse. Coming after the deaths of at least 30 people in Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Libya, Nigeria, and other Islamic countries during protests against cartoons ridiculing Muhammad, the Irving verdict makes a mockery of the claim that in democratic countries, freedom of expression is a basic right.... read |
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2006-06-14
| Global meat consumption is predicted to double by 2020. Yet in Europe and North America, there is growing concern about the ethics of the way meat and eggs are produced. The consumption of veal has fallen sharply since it became widely known that to produce so-called “white” – actually pale pink – veal, newborn calves are separated from their mothers, deliberately made anemic, denied roughage, and kept in stalls so narrow that they cannot walk or turn around.... read |
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2006-05-16
| In his History of European Morals, published in 1869, the Irish historian and philosopher W.E.H. Lecky wrote:... read |
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Happiness, Money, and Giving It Away
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Peter Singer
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Would you be happier if you were richer? Many people believe that they would be. But research conducted over many years suggests that greater wealth implies greater happiness only at quite low levels of income. People in the United States, for example, are, on average, richer than New Zealanders, but they are not happier. More dramatically, people in Austria, France, Japan, and Germany appear to be no happier than people in much poorer countries, like Brazil, Colombia, and the Philippines.... read
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The Hidden Costs of Money
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Peter Singer
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When people quote Saint Paul’s dictum that “Money is the root of all evil,” they usually have in mind not money, but the love of money. But new research shows that money itself, whether we are greedy for it or not, could be a problem.... read
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