Quotes by Peter Singer

All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.

Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.

As a matter of strict logic, perhaps, there is no contradiction in taking an interest in animals on both compassionate and gastronomic grounds. If a person is opposed to the infliction of suffering on animals, but not to the painless killing of animals, he could consistently eat animals that had lived free of all suffering and been instantly, painlessly slaughtered. Yet practically and psychologically it is impossible to be consistent in one's concern for nonhuman animals while continuing to dine on them. If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end. In time we will come to regard pigs, cattle, and chickens as things for us to use, no matter how strong our compassion may be; and when we find that to continue to obtain supplies of the bodies of these animals at a price we are able to pay it is necessary to change their living conditions a little, we will be unlikely to regard these changes too critically. The factory farm is nothing more than the application of technology to the idea that animals are means to our ends. Our eating habits are dear to us and not easily altered. We have a strong interest in convincing ourselves that our concern for other animals does not require us to stop eating them. No one in the habit of eating an animal can be completely without bias in judging whether the conditions in which that animal is reared caused suffering.

The left needs a new paradigm. The collapse of communism and the abandonment by democratic socialists parties of the traditional socialist objective of national ownership of the means of production have deprived the left of the goals it cherished over the two centuries in which it formed and grew to a position of great political power and intellectual influence. But that is not the only reason why the left needs a new paradigm. The trade union movement has been the powerhouse and the treasury of the left in many countries. What capitalists failed to accomplish by a century of repressive measures against trade union leaders, the World Trade Organization, enthusiastically endorsed by social democrat government around the world, is doing for them. When barriers to imports are removed, nationally based trade unions are undermined.