Peter Singer Quotes
In a democracy, citizens pass judgment on their government, and if they are kept in the dark about what their government is doing, they cannot be in a position to make well-grounded decisions.
Singer, Peter. "WikiLeaks and the Ethics of Secrecy." Project Syndicate, 10 Jan. 2011.
Declaration of Humanity. Printed in Japanese Newspapers. Contrast this with the previous Japanese political leadership tradition as {43746}
There were many critics who were concerned that the ITU was trying to regulate the Internet, but no one could be sure as the proceedings and meetings of the ITU are not publicly available. This is a classic UN problem. They see themselves as representing governments and not people. The Governments have the information and so they delude themselves into believing that they are transparent, when the reality is that for the individual they are totally opaque. Most critics who worry about UN regulation of the Internet, are just as concerned with what other countries are proposing than what there own government’s position is. And most governments themselves do not release the actual transcripts or proceedings of the ITC meetings but only documents giving their positions. This is an example of secrecy being promoted as transparency where the UN covers for member nations who want to maintain secrecy.
The public desire to know about and influence the details about diplomatic affairs is not just a problem of the 21st century. Here the Secretary of State describes it in 1922.
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.
