Peter Singer Quotes
Almost everybody accepts that some people can be killed. 'The concept of 'brain death' - the belief that people on respirators can legitimately be killed - shows that.
Singer, Peter. Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics. St. Martin's Press, 1994.
The Congressman had been found to have committed a number of serious ethical violations and then was accused by a Texas District Attorney of his own party of money laundering and violating Texas campaign finance laws. His ethical and legal problems were heavily covered in the news when the Schiavo case developed of the woman whose brain had been starved for oxygen, for years in a persistent vegetative state, who had not wished to live hooked up to tubes. Some conservatives challenged the right of the husband and the hospital to follow the woman’s wishes even after the courts had consistently ruled that this had been the woman’s wish. Delay used this tragic case to divert attention from his own lapses. It did not work. Some months thereafter, he was forced to resign.
Sarah Palin, former Republican Governor of Alaska, coined a new term when she charged that proposed Health Care legislation would create a "death panel" See Palin Quotation 644138. It was an absolute lie totally made up by Palin. However a number of conservative members of Congress then repeated the prevarication in Congressional Debate and elsewhere. One poll showed that after it spread, about 85% of respondents were familiar with the charge and of those who were familiar with it, about 30% thought it was true and Palin's new term won the dubius distinction of winning the "Lie of the Year" award. Despite the fact that it was totally false, in order to win Obamacare be a single vote, the President had to eliminate the part of the bill that allowed payment to physicians to take the time and explain to patients and/or their families, the various options of palliative treatment during the last months of life. Many people thought that the doctors would form death panels.
Peter Albert David Singer AC is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues in favour of veganism, and his essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", in which he argues in favour of donating to help the global poor. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he stated in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian.
