Peter Singer
Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, and The Life You Can Save.
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2012-01-12
| On the first day of 2012, keeping hens in tiny battery cages became illegal throughout the EU – a major advance in animal welfare, and therefore, for Europe, a step towards becoming a more civilized and humane society. But why is Europe so far ahead of other countries in its concern for animals?... read |
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2011-12-16
| Last month, an expert panel of the Royal Society of Canada released a report on decision-making at the end of life. The report provides a strong argument for allowing doctors to help their patients to die, provided that the patients are competent and freely request such assistance.... read |
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2011-11-11
| Cigarettes are among the deadliest artifacts in human history, and kill more people every year than AIDS, Malaria, and traffic accidents combined. If we want to save lives and improve health, nothing else that is readily achievable would be as effective as banning their sale.... read |
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2011-10-12
| The US state of Georgia recently executed a man who might well have been innocent. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the death penalty in the US is a product of a particular culture – perhaps not even American culture as a whole, but rather the culture of the American South, where 80% of all US executions take place.... read |
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2011-09-13
| The small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is known internationally for its policy of promoting “gross national happiness” instead of economic growth. But can happiness really be measured, and can people really agree on what increases it?... read |
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2011-08-09
| Two new movies released this month – one a science-fiction blockbuster, the other a revealing documentary – raise the issue of our relations with our closest non-human relatives, the great apes. Both dramatize insights and lessons that should not be ignored.... read |
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2011-07-13
| Mahatma Gandhi acutely observed that “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” Indeed, charting the progress of animal-welfare legislation around the world is an indication of moral progress more generally.... read |
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2011-06-13
| Can moral judgments be true or false, or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer.... read |
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2011-05-12
| People donate hundreds of millions of dollars to help people after a disaster – even after a disaster in a wealthy country like Japan – but are unwilling to invest the same amount to save lives before a predictable disaster strikes. But we should be guided by the best estimates of the chance that prevention will save lives, and by the cost of saving those lives.... read |
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A Universal Library
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Peter Singer 
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Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written. Today, we can make not just books, but paintings, films, and music, available to anyone, anywhere, anytime – but we don't, owing to a copyright system skewed toward corporate interests.... read
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2010-02-15
| All over the world, people have responded generously to the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti, killing up to 200,000 people. But, terrible as that death toll is, it is fewer than the number of children who, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, die every 10 days from avoidable, poverty-related causes.... read |
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2009-05-14
| 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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2006-04-18
| 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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2006-06-14
| 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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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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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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2011-06-13
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| Can moral judgments be true or false, or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer.... 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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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 |
2011-11-11
