Peter Singer Quotes

There are a few dogmas and double standards and really regrettable exports from philosophy that have confounded the thinking of scientists on the subject of morality.

The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have their right to exist! There is still another world to be discovered--and more than one! Set sail, you philosophers!

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.

There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.

It's because I work in ethics, and, more specifically, applied ethics, that I think it's important that if you have things to say that you think are right and you think could make the world a better place, it's important that many people read about them.

Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.

The feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.

I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions.

Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life; and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.

Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.

My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

Ethics are pre-determined and a matter of discovery, not a evolved concept.