Peter Singer Quotes

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise.

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

In the real world in which we live, you always have to choose between evils. And in choosing between evils, you have to have moral criteria for how to make those choices.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.

One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility.

The foundations of morality are like all other foundations: If you dig too much about them, the superstructure will come tumbling down.

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

I wanted to play around with the format, really tear it to pieces and shake it up. For example, if Mitch saves someone from drowning, and that person then goes out and releases a virus that kills a million people. Imagine the moral implications of that.

Modern morality is all about perception.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics.

Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.

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.

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