Animal Liberation by Peter Singer

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically
by Peter Singer
Published 1 Jan 2015

“Tzu Chi Fundraising for Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Survivors,” USA Tzu Chi, March 18, 2011; “International Buddhist Organization Tzu Chi Foundation Giving Sandy Victims $600 Visa Debit Cards,” New York Daily News, November 18, 2012; http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/buddhist-organization-sandy-victims–600-debit-cards-article–1.1204224. 8. Paul Niehaus provided information for this section. 9. Peter Singer, “Animal Liberation,” New York Review of Books, April 5, 1973. 10. For details, see Peter Singer, Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). Chapter 6. Giving a Part of Yourself 1. John Arthur, “Rights and the Duty to Bring Aid,” in William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette, eds., World Hunger and Moral Obligation (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1996). 2.

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Harish Sethu, “Is Vegan Outreach Right About How Many Animals Suffer to Death?,” http://www.countinganimals.com/is-vegan-outreach-right-about-how-many-animals-suffer-to-death/. 6. Animal Charity Evaluators, FAQ, Position Statement. See http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/about/faq/ and http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/about/position-statement/. 7. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (1975; reprint, New York: Harper, 2009), chap. 1; for support for my claim that at a philosophical level the argument against speciesism is “won,” see Colin McGinn, “Eating Animals Is Wrong,” London Review of Books, January 24, 1991, 14–15. 8. See, for example, Carl Cohen, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine 315 (1986): 865–70; Michael Leahy, Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective (London: Routledge, 1991). 9.

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Chapter 15 includes material that was previously published in “Preventing Human Extinction,” coauthored with Nick Beckstead and Matt Wage and available at: www.effective-altruism.com/preventing-human-extinction. A fuller statement of the argument about the roles of reason and emotion in motivating altruism can be found in chapter 2 of Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, The Point of View of the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Peter Singer University Center for Human Values, Princeton University & School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne PART ONE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM 1 What Is Effective Altruism? I met Matt Wage in 2009 when he took my Practical Ethics class at Princeton University.

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
by Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Published 1 May 2006

After several weeks he sent Ornelas a final email that said, basically, "I'm done. We're not going to agree about this." But Mackey was far from done. Over the summer of 2003, as he later told an interviewer, "I read a dozen books about how animals are raised in this country, going all the way back to Peter Singer's Animal Liberation in 1975. The more I read, the more I was interested in it. I said, `Damn, these people are right. This is terrible."' At that point, Mackey realized that he "couldn't continue to eat animal products-I just wanted to be a vegan." During his years as a vegetarian, Mackey said, "When it came to dairy products and eggs and that kind of thing, I just looked the other way ...

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EATING MEAT: THE BEST DEFENSE The most thoughtful defenses of eating meat come from those writers who are strongest in their condemnation of factory farming: Michael Pollan, Hugh Fearnsley-Whittingstall, and Roger Scruton. Pollan's The New York Times Sunday Magazine essay "An Animal's Place," begins with the line: "The first time I opened Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a ribeye steak cooked medium-rare." From there he goes on to describe factory farming and acknowledge that we cannot justify eating the food that this system produces. Pollan then juxtaposes his grim account of modern industral agriculture with a lyrical portrayal of Polyface Farm, spread over 550 acres of grass and forest in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.

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We have added the categories "Food, Beverages and Candy" and "Restaurants" to reach the total figure. 4 Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, University of California Press, Los Angeles and Berkeley, 2002. See also www.foodpolitics.com. 5 See www.supersizeme.com. 6 For a full account of how veal calves are kept, see Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, Ecco, New York, 2001 (first published 1975). On the decline in veal consumption, see USDA Economic Research Service, Food availability spreadsheets: Beef, veal, pork, lamb and mutton, and total red meats, 21 Dec 2005, www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FoodConsumption/spreadsheets/mtredsu.xls 7 Nanette Hanson, "Organic food sales see healthy growth," MSNBC News, December 3, 2004, http:// msnbc.msn.com/id/6638417; for the EU, see "Ikea embraces organic ingredients," Food Navigator, July 7, 2005 www.foodnavigator.com/news/news-ng.asp?

Diet for a New America
by John Robbins

Farm Journal, August 1966. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Farm Journal, November 1968. 15. Ibid. 16. Jim Mason and Peter Singer, Animal Factories (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), 30. 17. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon Books, 1975), 117. 18. Farm Journal, May 1973. 19. Farmer and Stockbreeder, July 11, 1961. 20. J. Messersmith, personal communication with author. 21. L. Taylor, National Hog Farmer (March 1978): 27. 22. Farm Journal, April 1970. 23. Singer, Animal Liberation, 118. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Mason and Singer, Animal Factories, 30–31, 42. 27. Ibid., 42. 28. Ibid., 43–44. 29.

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Watson, Animals in Splendour (Camp Hill, PA: Horizon Press, 1967), 88. 4. Watson, Animals in Splendour, 89. 5. Ibid. 6. Juvenal, cited in Smith and Daniel, The Chicken Book, 160. 7. Study described in Vegetarian Times (January 1984): 64. 8. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon Books, 1975), 102. 9. Farmer and Stockbreeder, January 30, 1962. 10. Jim Mason and Peter Singer, Animal Factories (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), 5. 11. Textron from Wall Street Journal, August 9, 1967. 12. Desmond Morris, “The Clockwork Egg,” Food Animals Concern Trust (Chicago), FACT sheet no. 28 (February 1983). 13.

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Ovid, Metamorphoses, cited in Wynne-Tyson, Extended Circle, 232. 6. “Livestock Auction—An Arena of Animal Abuse,” Mainstream (Spring 1985): 16. 7. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon Books, 1975), 148. 8. Official Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting, Livestock Conservation, Omaha, Nebraska, May 1974, 44, 93. 9. Ibid. 10. Irving Wallace et al., The Book of Lists #2 (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 240. 11. “Chloramphenicol Use by Cattlemen Said to Be Dangerous,” Vegetarian Times (September 1984): 6. 12. Singer, Animal Liberation, 150. 13. Richard Battaglia and Vernon Mayrose, Handbook of Livestock Management Techniques (Minneapolis, MN: Burgess Publishing Co., 1981). 14.

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
by Peter Singer
Published 3 Mar 2009

ALSO BY PETER SINGER Democracy and Disobedience Animal Liberation Practical Ethics Marx Animal Factories (with James Mason) The Expanding Circle Hegel The Reproduction Revolution (with Dean Wells) Should the Baby Live? (with Helga Kuhse) How Are We to Live? Rethinking Life and Death Ethics into Action A Darwinian Left Writings on an Ethical Life Unsanctifing Human Life (edited by Helga Kuhse) One World Pushing Time Away The President of Good and Evil How Ethical Is Australia? (with Tom Gregg) The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason) To Renata, without whom … Contents Preface THE ARGUMENT 1.

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Since 1999 he has been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and since 2005, Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, attached to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. Peter Singer first became well known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation. He is the author of many other books, as well as of the major entry on ethics in the current edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Two collections of his writings have been published: Writings on an Ethical Life, which he edited, and Unsanctifying Human Life, edited by Helga Kuhse.

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William T Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr, and Daniel Burghart, “Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations,” Science, vol. 316, no. 5831 (June 15, 2007), pp. 1622-25. 24. For more information about Henry Spira, see Peter Singer, Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement (Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). ABOUT THE AUTHOR PETER SINGER was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Oxford, La Trobe University, and Monash University, and has held several other visiting appointments.

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Dec 2006

For my own part, neither option seemed especially appetizing; certainly looking away was now completely off the table. Which might explain how it was I found myself attempting to read Peter Singer in a steakhouse. THIS IS NOT something I'd recommend if you're determined to con- tinue eating meat. Animal Liberation, comprised of equal parts philosophical argument and journalistic description, is one of those rare books that demands you either defend the way you live or change it. Because Singer is so skilled in argument, for many readers it is easier to change. .Animal Liberation has converted countless thousands to vegetarianism, and it didn't take me long to see why: within a few pages he had succeeded in throwing me and my meat eating, not to mention my hunting plans, on the defensive.

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Such has been the genius of capitalism, to re-create something akin to a state of nature in the modern supermarket or fast-food outlet, throwing us back on a perplexing, nutritionally perilous landscape deeply shadowed again by the omnivore 's dilemma. • 303 SEVENTEEN THE ETHICS OF EATING ANIMALS 1. THE STEAKHOUSE DIALOGUES The first time I opened Peter Singer's Animal Liberation I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare. If that sounds like a recipe for cognitive dissonance, if not indigestion, well, that was sort of the idea. It had been a long time since this particular omnivore had felt any dilemma about eating meat, but then I had never before involved myself so directly in the processes of turning animals into food: owning a steak-bound steer, working the killing cones in Joel Salatin's processing shed, and now preparing to hunt a wild animal.

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As a rule, animals in the wild don't get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones. Which brings us to the case of animals in the wild. The very existence of prédation in nature, of animals eating animals, is the cause of much anguished hand-wringing in the animal rights literature. "It must be admitted," Peter Singer writes, "that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it." (Talk about the need for peacekeeping forces!) Some animal people train their dogs and cats to become vegetarians. (Note: The cats will require nutritional supplements to survive.) Matthew Scully, in Dominion, a Christianconservative treatment of animal rights, calls prédation "the intrinsic evil in nature's design . . . among the hardest of all things to fathom."

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 2002

Norton, 1978). 27 On this point, see Arnhart (1998), pp. 119–120. 28 If one looks at Locke’s sources on infanticide, they fall into the category of the exotic travel literature that was produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to astonish Europeans with the strangeness and barbarity of foreign lands. 29 Peter Singer and Susan Reich, Animal Liberation (New York: New York Review Books, 1990), p. 6; and Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). 30 This is a point originally made by Jeremy Bentham, and reiterated by Singer and Reich (1990), pp. 7–8. 31 See John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). 32 Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 194–202. 33 Ibid., pp. 64–65. 34 Peter Singer (in Singer and Reich, 1990) makes a bizarre argument that the case for equality is a moral idea in no way dependent on factual assertions about the actual equality of the beings involved.

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There is today around the world a very powerful animal rights movement, which seeks to improve the lot of the monkeys, chickens, minks, pigs, cows, and other animals that we butcher, experiment on, eat, wear, turn into upholstery, and otherwise treat as means rather than ends in themselves. The radical fringe of this movement has on occasion turned violent, bombing medical research labs and chicken processing plants. The bioethicist Peter Singer has built his career around the promotion of animal rights and a critique of what he calls the speciesism of human beings—the unjust favoring of our species over others.29 All of this leads us to raise the question posed by James Watson at the beginning of Chapter 7: What gives a salamander a right?

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Membership in one of these groups does not guarantee that one’s individual characteristics will be close to the median for that group (I know a lot of individual children who would vote more wisely than their parents), but it is a good enough indicator of ability for practical purposes. What an animal rights proponent like Peter Singer calls speciesism is thus not necessarily an ignorant and self-serving prejudice on the part of human beings, but a belief about human dignity that can be defended on the basis of an empirically grounded view of human specificity. We have broached this subject with the discussion of human cognition.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance
by Simon Fairlie
Published 14 Jun 2010

Whereas Descartes postulated that animals were ‘automata’ who couldn’t feel pain, in order to justify eating and mistreating them, Shriver proposes to manufacture automata for the same purpose. In an article published in the journal Neuroethics, he wrote: Though the vegetarian movement sparked by Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation has achieved some success, there is more animal suffering caused today due to factory farming than there was when the book was originally written … We may be very close to, if not already at, the point where we can genetically engineer factory-farmed livestock with a reduced or completely eliminated capacity to suffer.

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The earliest (and most elegantly expressed) use of the ten-to-one figure I have located is in Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet where he observes: The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance … if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth.4 Here for example is an early modern statement, in respect of protein, from Peter Singer: Assume we have one acre of fertile land. We can use this acre to grow a high-protein plant food, like peas or beans. If we do this, we will get between 300 and 500 lbs of protein from our acre. Alternatively we can use our acre to grow a crop that we feed to animals, and then kill and eat the animals.

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They are also likely to be even more important at some point in the future should the effects of climate change become critical and fast-acting measures need to be adopted.69 In other words, if pressure from climate change becomes more intense we are likely to see the GWP of methane jacked up even further with the result that methane will occupy a more imposing proportion of the global carbon budget. In the language of economists, the higher the discount rate, the more commanding a position methane takes in the global carbon budget. There are increasing calls from vegan and anti-livestock commentators such as Peter Singer and Robert Goodland for the GWP of methane to be raised from 25 to 72. Singer, together with two colleagues Geoff Russell and Barry Brooks, has employed a useful analogy to explain the effect of GWP ratings: A tonne of methane has 100 times the warming during the first five years of its lifetime as a tonne of CO2, but under current Kyoto rules, its comparative potency is set at 21.

The Price of Life: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides
by Jenny Kleeman
Published 13 Mar 2024

Strangers overseas matter as much as our neighbours, future generations are just as important as people already alive today, and the lives of sentient animals are valued equally to human lives. Spend as much as you can, to save as many lives as possible, and the good that you do can be objectively measured. And bettered. The grandfather of the EA approach is the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. His 1975 book, Animal Liberation, says that we should care equally about any being that has the capacity to suffer, even if we can’t see them, even if they are not human. His 1972 essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, argues that failing to donate to help children dying in the developing world is the same as failing to dive in and rescue a child drowning before your eyes for fear of ruining expensive clothes; if we spend money on things beyond our basic survival, we are essentially walking on by while others die.

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While they are never physically far from their possessions, many of them aren’t really here at all. Every year, hundreds of homeless people die on the streets of this city; the leading cause of death is overdose, followed by suicide, homicide and chronic medical conditions. To use philosopher Peter Singer’s analogy, the ‘drowning child’ in the Bay Area is the woman sleeping rough on the pavement outside your office, and the people who work at OpenPhil and GiveWell walk past her every day. While OpenPhil has an area of focus it calls ‘land use reform’ – which it says seeks to ‘reduce the harms caused by excessively restrictive local land use regulations’ that can lead to higher rents – it’s about making it easier to build properties and promote economic growth, and not helping rough sleepers specifically.

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Then Will tells me about meeting the computer scientist-turned-philosopher Toby Ord, and his eyes sparkle. ‘Toby had been thinking for many years about the problem of global poverty. He had planned to give away most of his income, and had been taking the ideas of cost-effectiveness very seriously.’ There was an energy and optimism to Toby that drew Will in, he says. ‘With Peter Singer, the framing was always obligation – that you are acting wrongly unless you do this. Whereas Toby was very upbeat.’ Will switched to study ethics, and in 2009 he and Toby launched Giving What We Can, a campaign to encourage people to donate at least 10 per cent of their income to charity. ‘How many people have signed the Giving What We Can pledge today?’

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
by William MacAskill
Published 27 Jul 2015

Will MacAskill, a leader of the effective altruism movement and a rising star in philosophy, now displays his talent for telling stories that pack a punch. This must-read book will lead people to change their careers, their lives, and the world, for the better.” —Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton University and author of Animal Liberation and The Most Good You Can Do “Humanity currently spends more money on cigarette ads than on making sure that we as a species survive this century. We’ve got our priorities all wrong, and we need effective altruism to right them. If you want to make a real difference on the biggest issues of our time, you need to read Doing Good Better.”

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HM1146.M33 2015 171'.8—dc23 2015000705 While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Version_1 To Toby Ord, Peter Singer, and Stanislav Petrov, without whom this book would not have been written CONTENTS PRAISE FOR DOING GOOD BETTER TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION INTRODUCTION Worms and Water Pumps: How can you do the most good? ONE You Are the 1 Percent: Just how much can you achieve?

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For very helpful feedback on the manuscript, I thank Alexander Berger, Jason Boult, Niel Bowerman, Uri Bram, Ryan Carey, Nick Cooney, Roman Duda, Sam Dumitriu, Sebastian Farquhar, Austen Forrester, Iason Gabriel, Evan Gaensbauer, Daniel Gastfried, Eric Gastfriend, Aaron Gertler, Josh Goldenberg, Alex Gordon-Brown, Katja Grace, Topher Hallquist, Elie Hassenfeld, Roxanne Heston, Hauke Hillebrandt, Jacob Hilton, Ben Hoskin, Chris Jenkins, Holden Karnofsky, Greg Lewis, Amanda MacAskill, Larissa MacFarquhar, Georgie Mallett, Michael Marcode de Freitas, Sören Mindermann, David Moss, Luke Muehlhauser, Sally Murray, Vipul Naik, Anthony Obeyesekere, Rossa O’Keeffe-O’Donovan, Toby Ord, Michael Peyton Jones, Duncan Pike, Alex Richard, Jess Riedel, Josh Rosenberg, Matt Sharp, Carl Shulman, Peter Singer, Imma Six, Pablo Stafforini, Shayna Strom, Tim Telleen-Lawton, Derek Thompson, Ben Todd, Helen Toner, Robert Wiblin, Boris Yakubchik, Vincent Yu, Pascal Zimmer, and the many others with whom I’ve discussed these ideas. I owe an enormous debt to my research assistant, Pablo Stafforini, who is rapidly becoming part of my extended mind.

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
by Lierre Keith
Published 30 Apr 2009

As of now, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of food energy for humans—somewhere between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for a calorie of food.36 The fossil fuel is in both the fertilizer and the pesticides, and it’s essential to the machinery needed to plant, harvest, process, and transport grain. All told, an acre of corn drinks about fifty gallons of oil.37 The political vegetarians, however noble their intentions, are planning a planetary diet in complete ignorance of where food comes from. Advocates like Peter Singer and John Robbins want us to grow annual grains and no animals at all. Set aside the topsoil, water, climate, and topography problems. What is going to fertilize that grain? Peter, John: what is going to feed your food? Vegetarians, like everyone else in an urban industrial culture, have no concept that plants need to eat, that soil is alive and hungry.

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Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers? Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum? Everything falls into place with those three questions. Those annual monocrops lose on all three counts, unless you live in Nebraska, where it “only” fails the first two. Animal rights philosopher Peter Singer argues that you should only eat animal products if you can see their origin with your own eyes. While I agree with the impulse—to end the denial and ignorance that protect factory farming—this demand has to be much bigger: you should know where every bite of your food comes from. We need to end the denial and ignorance that protect agriculture.

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The tree isn’t offering sweetness out of the goodness of its heartwood. It’s striking a bargain, and even though we’ve shaken hands and collected, we aren’t carrying through on our side of the deal. There’s a glaring anthropocentrism in this argument, which is strange coming from people espousing a specific politic of animal liberation. “The fruit tree gives me my food and I give back the seeds to nature so other trees can grow,” writes one vegetarian.2 Yes, but he isn’t giving the seeds back to nature. Why are we humans allowed to take without giving? Isn’t that called exploitation? Or at the very least, stealing? Fruit isn’t, as claimed, “the only freely given food.”3 The point of that fruit is not humans.

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food
by Chase Purdy
Published 15 Jun 2020

We crisscross suburbia in gas-guzzling cars, seek respite in air-conditioned buildings, store data in digital clouds, and communicate with the world over invisible airwaves. Even the apples and bananas we buy in the grocery store are the product of human engineering. I asked Princeton University ethical philosopher and author of Animal Liberation Peter Singer if he thinks humans are going too far, if it struck him as dangerous to take something as fundamental as meat and try to build it from the ground up in laboratories. Singer’s 1975 work is the backbone of the modern animal rights movement, inspiring the founding members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

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They initially connected through sports, but as their friendship evolved, so too did the nature of their conversations. Tetrick has always been an animal lover, but whether he would have connected those dots to the animal liberation movement on his own, let alone have the moxie to take up the cause as an activist, is debatable. That gray afternoon from his youth, protesting the circus, might have been one of Tetrick’s first forays into the animal liberation movement, but perhaps more important, it represented a moment in his impressionable youth that gave him a sense of belonging. Balk was his surrogate brother. Tetrick estimates that he spent more time at Balk’s house during high school than he spent at his own.

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“When he first met me there was a vessel, it was called the baseball field, you know? Or it was the football field. But then, when we got a little bit older, he knew I didn’t want to work at the Humane Society, so what do you do with me? Where the fuck do you put this guy, you know?” Tetrick was still deeply interested in animal liberation and activism. The problem, though, was that he’d come off several years spent in Liberia, South Africa, and Kenya, watching up close how the nonprofit sector repeatedly proved ineffective at solving some of the problems it was supposed to be addressing. “We were always raised with this false choice: You can either work for a nonprofit and do a lot of good and not make any money, or you can work for a company and not do a lot of good, but maybe you can donate,” he said.

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006

Then, too, there is improved education and, in particular, the increased understanding that each of us shares a common humanity with members of other races and with the other sex – both deeply unbiblical ideas that come from biological science, especially evolution. One reason black people and women and, in Nazi Germany, Jews and gypsies have been treated badly is that they were not perceived as fully human. The philosopher Peter Singer, in Animal Liberation, is the most eloquent advocate of the view that we should move to a post-speciesist condition in which humane treatment is meted out to all species that have the brainpower to appreciate it. Perhaps this hints at the direction in which the moral Zeitgeist might move in future centuries.

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With corresponding minor differences, the Kuna show the same moral judgements as the rest of us. Of particular interest for this book, Hauser also wondered whether religious people differ from atheists in their moral intuitions. Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should differ. But it seems that they don’t. Hauser, working with the moral philosopher Peter Singer,87 focused on three hypothetical dilemmas and compared the verdicts of atheists with those of religious people. In each case, the subjects were asked to choose whether a hypothetical action is morally ‘obligatory’, ‘permissible’ or ‘forbidden’. The three dilemmas were: Denise’s dilemma. Ninety per cent of people said it was permissible to divert the trolley, killing the one to save the five.

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Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown. New York: Holt. Shermer, M. (2006). The Soul of Science. Los Angeles: Skeptics Society. Silver, L. M. (2006). Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life. New York: HarperCollins. Singer, P. (1990). Animal Liberation. London: Jonathan Cape. Singer, P. (1994). Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, K. (1995). Ken’s Guide to the Bible. New York: Blast Books. Smolin, L. (1997). The Life of the Cosmos. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Smythies, J. (2006). Bitter Fruit. Charleston, SC: Booksurge.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

My point is not to make a moral case for vegetarianism but to shed light on the mindset of human violence and cruelty. History and ethnography suggest that people can treat strangers the way we now treat lobsters, and our incomprehension of such deeds may be compared with animal rights activists’ incomprehension of ours. It is no coincidence that Peter Singer, the author of The Expanding Circle, is also the author of Animal Liberation. The observation that people may be morally indifferent to other people who are outside a mental circle immediately suggests an opening for the effort to reduce violence: understand the psychology of the circle well enough to encourage people to put all of humanity inside it.

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Customs that were common throughout history and prehistory—slavery, punishment by mutilation, execution by torture, genocide for convenience, endless blood feuds, the summary killing of strangers, rape as the spoils of war, infanticide as a form of birth control, and the legal ownership of women—have vanished from large parts of the world. The philosopher Peter Singer has shown how continuous moral progress can emerge from a fixed moral sense.18 Suppose we are endowed with a conscience that treats other persons as targets of sympathy and inhibits us from harming or exploiting them. Suppose, too, that we have a mechanism for assessing whether a living thing gets to be classified as a person.

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And it is incapable of stipulating the suite of values and customs that appear to be necessary for a democracy to function in practice. Acknowledging the relative success of constitutional democracy does not require one to be a flag-waving patriot. But it does suggest that something may have been right about the theory of human nature that guided its architects. The left needs a new paradigm. —Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left (1999)43 Conservatives need Charles Darwin. —Larry Arnhart, “Conservatives, Design, and Darwin” (2000)44 What’s going on? That voices of the contemporary left and the contemporary right are both embracing evolutionary psychology after decades of reviling it shows two things.

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Published 18 Jun 2012

Arne Naess, “The Basics of the Deep Ecology Movement,” in Alan Drengson and Bill Devall (eds.), The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), p. 111. 30. Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecological Movement: A Summary,” in Andrew Dobson (ed.), The Green Reader (London: Deutsch, 1991), p. 243. 31. The term speciesism was popularized by Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (Avon, 1977). 32. Aldo Leopold, “A Sand County Almanac,” in Dobson (ed.), The Green Reader, pp. 240–41. 33. For a persuasive defense of this claim, see Michael Thompson, Life and Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 34. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 118. 35.

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Charles Francis Atkinson, vol. 1 (London: George Allen, 1932), p. 168. 36. See David E. Cooper, A Philosophy of Gardens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), for an interesting defense of the importance of gardens and gardening to the good life. 37. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, pp. 169–70. 38. J. Baird Callicott, “Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair,” in Robert Elliot (ed.), Environmental Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 39. Quoted in Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, p. 105. CHAPTER 6. ELEMENTS OF THE GOOD LIFE 1. Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 5. 2.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

Brigid Brophy has been credited with the term animal rights, which she deliberately coined by analogy: she wanted to associate “the case for non-human animals with that clutch of egalitarian or libertarian ideas which have sporadically, though quite often with impressively actual political results, come to the rescue of other oppressed classes, such as slaves or homosexuals or women.” 272 The real turning point was the philosopher Peter Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation, the so-called bible of the animal rights movement. 273 The sobriquet is doubly ironic because Singer is a secularist and a utilitarian, and utilitarians have been skeptical of natural rights ever since Bentham called the idea “nonsense on stilts.” But following Bentham, Singer laid out a razor-sharp argument for a full consideration of the interests of animals, while not necessarily granting them “rights.”

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THE RISE OF EMPATHY AND THE REGARD FOR HUMAN LIFE The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing. As we shall see in chapter 9, though people in all cultures can react sympathetically to kin, friends, and babies, they tend to hold back when it comes to larger circles of neighbors, strangers, foreigners, and other sentient beings. In his book The Expanding Circle, the philosopher Peter Singer has argued that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as they value their own.136 An interesting question is what inflated the empathy circle. And a good candidate is the expansion of literacy. Reading is a technology for perspective-taking.

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Other experiments have shown that sniffing oxytocin makes people more generous in an Ultimatum game (in which they divide a sum while anticipating the response of a recipient, who can veto the deal for both of them), but not in a Dictator game (where the recipient has to take it or leave it, and the proposer needn’t take his reaction into account). It seems likely that the oxytocin network is a vital trigger in the sympathetic response to other people’s beliefs and desires. In chapter 4 I alluded to Peter Singer’s hypothesis of an expanding circle of empathy, really a circle of sympathy. Its innermost kernel is the nurturance we feel toward our own children, and the most reliable trigger for this tenderness is the geometry of the juvenile face—the phenomenon of perception we call cuteness. In 1950 the ethologist Konrad Lorenz noted that entities with measurements typical of immature animals evoke feelings of tenderness in the beholder.

Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen
by Dan Heath
Published 3 Mar 2020

We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them.… We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!” I. At one point, desperate for insight, I sent a pleading email to Peter Singer, one of the world’s leading moral philosophers and the author of the book Animal Liberation. What did he make of the Macquarie Island intervention? He replied, “I’m not willing to say that we should let species go extinct rather than kill introduced animals, but if there is extreme suffering (e.g., the deaths of millions of rabbits in Australia because of the introduced virus myxomatosis) then I am doubtful that we ought to do that.”

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Accountable Care Organization (ACO), 201–2, 204 ACT scores, 167, 168 air pollution, 15, 111–12, 113, 186 airports, 124, 125 alarms, 145–46 alcohol, 8, 71, 75–81, 125, 231, 239 violence and, 117, 121 Aledade, 202 alien life, 226–27 Allensworth, Elaine, 24, 27, 167 All in the Family, 68 ambulances, 137–40, 142, 162 American Health Care Paradox, The (Bradley and Taylor), 12 American Heart Association, 142 Ander, Roseanna, 116 Anderson, Ray, 39–40, 48–54 Andromeda Strain, The (Crichton), 227 anger management, 119–20 Angie’s List, 200 ANGI Homeservices, 200 Animal Liberation (Singer), 174n AP (advanced placement) courses, 167, 168 Apollo mission, 226–28 Archimedes, 115 astrobiology, 227, 231 Athey, Susan, 159–60 Atlantic, 35, 147 Atlantis, 207–8, 225 ATM machines, 210, 211 Auerbach, John, 191 Baden-Powell, Robert, 243 Baez, Ritchie, 164–65 Baltimore, Md., 97, 98 bandwidth, 58–60 banks, 210 baseball, 153–54 Batalden, Paul, 23 Becoming a Man (BAM), 117–23, 249, 250 Bedson, Henry, 16n Beriwal, Madhu, 213–18 Bernstein, Ethan, 178 Best, Charles, 108 Bevan, Gwyn, 161 Beyers, Matt, 98 Bible, 161, 162 bicycles, 104–5 Bisognano, Maureen, 234 black ball idea, 224 Blanco, Kathleen, 219 Block, Robert, 214–15, 220 Bohan, Suzanne, 98 Borem, Paulo, 36–37 Boston, Mass., 155–59, 161 Boston Globe, 156 Bostrom, Nick, 223–26 Bradley, Elizabeth, 12 brain, 64, 158 Brazil, 33–37 Brown, Helen Gurley, 31 Brown, Michael L., 215 Building Healthy Communities (BHC), 110–13 Built for Zero, 94–95 bullying, 148 burglary, 7–9 buses, 112 Bush, George W., 147 by-name methodology, 236–37 Byrne, Liz, 231 California Endowment, 110, 112 Calvin, Melvin, 227 Campbell, Jacquelyn, 84–86 cancer, 143–44 thyroid, 143–45 cardiac emergencies, 138–40, 142 Carlier, Taco, 105 carpet, 39–40, 48–52, 54 cars, 33, 192, 224 air pollution and, 15 selling, 181–82 car safety and accidents, 6, 16, 103–4 children and, 44–47, 237 cats, on Macquarie Island, 172–74, 176 CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), 120, 126 CDC, 103 Celedon, Sandra, 111–14 Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), 240–41 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), 192, 240–43 Charles, Seymour, 44, 45 chest CT scans, 29–30 Chicago, Ill.: crime in, 116–17, 120–24, 126 plastic bags in, 186–88 Chicago Public Schools (CPS), 23–29, 42, 63, 88–89, 109, 137, 160, 167–68, 231, 236, 239 Chicken Little problem, 207–28 childbirth, 13, 128, 196 C-section, 33–38 Child Passenger Protection Act, 46 children, 64, 105 abuse of, 195 car safety and, 44–47, 237 day care for, 13, 195 Nurse-Family Partnership and, 194–99, 237–38 playground injuries and, 175 Chile, 81 chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), 66, 68, 69–70 Choe, Katie, 155–58, 161 churn rate, 135–37, 145 ClaimStat, 175, 184 Clark, A.

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past)
by Cixin Liu
Published 11 Nov 2014

He lived in a simple two-room adobe hut, which was filled with tools for planting trees: hoes, shovels, saws for pruning tree branches, and so on, all of which were locally made and crude. The dust that permeated the Northwest lay in a thin layer over his simple and rough-hewn bed and kitchen implements. A pile of books, most of which dealt with biology, sat on his bed. Ye noticed a copy of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. The only sign of modernity was a small radio set, hooked up to an external D battery. There was also an old telescope. Evans apologized for not being able to offer them anything to drink. He hadn’t had coffee for a while. There was water, but he only had one cup. “May we ask what you’re really doing here?”

Anarchy State and Utopia
by Robert Nozick
Published 15 Mar 1974

Thom Krystofiak. 11 At least one philosopher has questioned whether we have good reason to weight animals’ interests less than our own and to impose limitations less stringent on their treatment than on the treatment of people. See Leonard Nelson, System of Ethics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1956), sects. 66, 67. After my discussion of animals was written, this issue was raised in an interesting essay by Peter Singer, “Animal Liberation,” New York Review of Books, April 5, 1973, pp. 17-21. Unfortunately, Singer treats as a difficult issue whether rats may be killed to be stopped from biting children. It would be useful here to apply principles about response to innocent threats (see page 35 above). CHAPTER 4 / Prohibition, Compensation, and Risk 1 Contrast this with Kant’s view that “everyone may use violent means to compel another to enter into a juridical state of society.”

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San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1970. Seuss, Dr. Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose. New York: Random House, 1948. Sharp, Gene. The Politics of Non-violent Action, Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973. Singer, I. B. In My Father’s Court. New York’ Farrar, Straus, and Gireaux, 1966. Singer, Peter. “Animal Liberation.” New, York Review of Books (April 5, 1973):17-21. Slobodkin, Lawrence. Growth and Regulation of Animal Populations. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. Spencer, Herbert. Social Statics, 1st ed. London: Chapman, 1851. Spencer, Herbert. The Man Versus the State. Ohio: Caxton, 1960, Spooner, Lysander.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr
Published 1 Jan 2013

Marxist philosopher Georges Sorel believed that myths were essential for revolution. Writing in Nature, Professor Paul Bloom has observed that stories have helped shift the moral codes of nations: ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to end slavery in the United States, and descriptions of animal suffering in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and elsewhere have been powerful catalysts for the animal-rights movement.’ Stories change us first, and then they change the world. * The mind is addicted to story – crisis, struggle, resolution – because that is how it experiences life. We are in the world, and we are battling against foes in order to make better lives.

The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World
by John Robbins
Published 14 Sep 2010

The book mobilized social concern to the point that the British government appointed a royal commission to investigate. In confinement farming, Harrison warned, "cruelty is acknowledged only where profitability ceases."9 In the United States, popular understanding of the realities of modern meat production was first sparked in the late 1970s, when Peter Singer wrote the seminal Animal Liberation, followed in 1980 by the classic book Animal Factories, co-written with Jim Mason. In the late 1980s, Diet for a New America brought the issue to the attention of a great number of people, and contributed to the wider cultural awareness of how our livestock are treated. Noting the human health consequences to factory farming, I wrote ...

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

According to GiveWell.org in 2016, three of the most effective and impactful charities are: Against Malaria Foundation Deworm the World Initiative Give Directly ✸ Two of Will’s philosophical role models Peter Singer, Australian moral philosopher and Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. His most famous works are the surprisingly readable Practical Ethics and Animal Liberation. Derek Parfit, who has spent his entire life at All Souls College at Oxford, which is elite even within Oxford. Derek wrote a book called Reasons and Persons, which Will considers one of the most important books written in the 20th century.