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Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher who is Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer's work specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He wrote the book ''Animal Liberation (book), Animal Liberation'' (1975), in which he argues for vegetarianism, and the essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which argues the moral imperative of donating to help the poor around the world. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian. He revealed in ''The Point of View of the Universe'' (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian. On two occasions, Singer served as chair of the philosophy department at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996, he stood unsuccessfully as a Australian Greens, Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004, Singer was recognise ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
How Are We To Live?
''How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest'' is a 1993 book about applied ethics by moral philosopher Peter Singer. Singer argues that doing the right thing involves attending to the sufferings and preferences of other sentient beings. Summary Singer presents a history of ethical thought, and attempts to refute the popular idea that humans are genetically driven to be selfish. He explains how this idea has been attributed to Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith, and how politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan tried to persuade people that self-interest was good. Singer takes a contrary view, and argues that self-interest is a time-bomb for society. Singer discusses Japanese culture and how its ethical perspective differs from that of modern western culture, and attempts to infer a few properties of the development of ethical thought. Singer argues in favour of a form of R. M. Hare's notion of universalizability as a basis for ethics: he argues we should make c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drowning Child Analogy
"Famine, Affluence, and Morality" is an essay written by Peter Singer in 1971 and published in '' Philosophy & Public Affairs'' in 1972. It argues that affluent persons are morally obligated to donate far more resources to humanitarian causes than is considered normal in Western cultures. The essay was inspired by the starvation of Bangladesh Liberation War refugees, and uses their situation as an example, although Singer's argument is general in scope and not limited to the example of Bangladesh. The essay is anthologized widely as an example of Western ethical thinking. Summary One of the core arguments of this essay is that, if one can use one's wealth to reduce suffering—for example, by aiding famine-relief efforts—without any significant reduction in the well-being of oneself or others, it is immoral not to do so. Singer raises a drowning child analogy: in his essay: inaction is clearly immoral if a child is drowning in a shallow pond and someone ''can'' save them but ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Melbourne
Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung language, Boonwurrung/ or ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city of the States and territories of Australia, Australian state of Victoria (state), Victoria, and the second most-populous city in Australia, after Sydney. The city's name generally refers to a metropolitan area also known as Greater Melbourne, comprising an urban agglomeration of Local Government Areas of Victoria#Municipalities of Greater Melbourne, 31 local government areas. The name is also used to specifically refer to the local government area named City of Melbourne, whose area is centred on the Melbourne central business district and some immediate surrounds. The metropolis occupies much of the northern and eastern coastlines of Port Phillip Bay and spreads into the Mornington Peninsula, part of West Gippsland, as well as the hinterlands towards the Yarra Valley, the Dandenong Ranges, and the Macedon R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The institution moved to Newark, New Jersey, Newark in 1747 and then to its Mercer County, New Jersey, Mercer County campus in Princeton nine years later. It officially became a university in 1896 and was subsequently renamed Princeton University. The university is governed by the Trustees of Princeton University and has an endowment of $37.7 billion, the largest List of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment, endowment per student in the United States. Princeton provides undergraduate education, undergraduate and graduate education, graduate instruction in the hu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Utilitarian
In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the affected individuals. In other words, utilitarian ideas encourage actions that lead to the greatest good for the greatest number. Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea that underpins them all is, in some sense, to maximize utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being or related concepts. For instance, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described ''utility'' as the capacity of actions or objects to produce benefits, such as pleasure, happiness, and good, or to prevent harm, such as pain and unhappiness, to those affected. Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism and altruism, egalitarian utilita ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Secular
Secularity, also the secular or secularness (from Latin , or or ), is the state of being unrelated or neutral in regards to religion. The origins of secularity can be traced to the Bible itself. The concept was fleshed out through Christian history into the modern era. Since the Middle Ages, there have been clergy not pertaining to a religious order called "secular clergy". Furthermore, secular and religious entities were not separated in the medieval period, but coexisted and interacted naturally. The word ''secular'' has a meaning very similar to profane as used in a religious context. Today, anything that is not directly connected with religion may be considered secular, in other words, neutral to religion. Secularity does not mean , but . Many activities in religious bodies are secular, and though there are multiple types of secularity or secularization, most do not lead to irreligiosity. Linguistically, a process by which anything becomes secular is named ''secularizatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Applied Ethics
Applied ethics is the practical aspect of morality, moral considerations. It is ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and leadership. For example, bioethics is concerned with identifying the best approach to moral issues in the life sciences, such as euthanasia, the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with ecological issues such as the responsibility of government and corporations to clean up pollution. Business ethics includes the duties of Whistleblowing , whistleblowers to the public and to their employers. History Applied ethics has expanded the study of ethics beyond the realms of academic philosophical discourse. The field of applied ethics, as it appears today, emerged from debate surrounding rapid medical and technological advances in the early 1970s and is now established as a subdisciplin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moral Philosopher
Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics. Normative ethics aims to find general principles that govern how people should act. Applied ethics examines concrete ethical problems in real-life situations, such as abortion, treatment of animals, and business practices. Metaethics explores the underlying assumptions and concepts of ethics. It asks whether there are objective moral facts, how moral knowledge is possible, and how moral judgments motivate people. Influential normative theories are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. According to consequentialists, an act is right if it leads to the best consequences. Deontologists focus on acts themselves, saying that they must adhere to duties, like telling the truth and keeping promises. Virtue ethics se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australian Greens
The Australian Greens, commonly referred to simply as the Greens, are a Left-wing politics, left-wing green party, green Australian List of political parties in Australia, political party. As of 2025, the Greens are the third largest political party in Australia by vote and the fourth-largest by elected representation. Following the 2025 Australian federal election, 2025 Australian Federal Election, Larissa Waters serves as Leader of the Greens and Mehreen Faruqi serves as deputy leader. The party was formed in 1992 as a confederation of eight state and territorial parties. In their early years, the party was largely built around the personality of well-known Tasmanian politician Bob Brown, before expanding its representation substantially in the early part of the 21st century. The party cites four core values as its ideology, namely sustainability, ecological sustainability, social justice, grassroots democracy, and peace movement, peace and non-violence. The party's origin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Personism
Personism is an ethical philosophy of personhood as typified by the thought of the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. It amounts to a branch of secular humanism with an emphasis on certain rights-criteria. Personists believe that rights are conferred to the extent that a creature is a person. Michael Tooley provides the relevant definition of a person, saying it is a creature that is "capable of desiring to continue as a subject of experience and other mental states".''Bioethics: An Anthology'', by Helga Kuhse, Peter Singer A worldview like secular humanism is personism when the empathy and values are extended to the extent that the creature is a person, so for example apes get very similar rights while insects get vastly fewer rights. Consequently, a member of the human species may not necessarily fit the definition of "person" and thereby not receive all the rights bestowed to a person. Hence, such philosophers have engaged in arguing that certain disabled individuals (such ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Argument From Marginal Cases
The argument from marginal cases (also known as the argument from species overlap) is a philosophical argument within animal rights theory regarding the moral status of non-human animals. Its proponents hold that if human infants, senile people, the comatose, and cognitively disabled people have direct moral status, non-human animals must have a similar status, since there is no known morally relevant characteristic that those marginal-case humans have that animals lack. "Moral status" may refer to a right not to be killed or made to suffer, or to a general moral requirement to be treated in a certain way. Although various cases are made for it, Raymond Frey has described the argument from marginal cases collectively as 'one of the most common arguments in support of an equal value' of animals' lives. Overview The argument from marginal cases takes the form of a proof by contradiction. It attempts to show that you cannot coherently believe both that all humans have moral status, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Effective Altruism
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, who are sometimes called , follow a variety of approaches proposed by the movement, such as donating to selected charities and choosing careers with the aim of maximizing positive impact. The movement gained popularity outside academia, spurring the creation of research centers, advisory organizations, and charities, which collectively have donated several hundred million dollars. Effective altruists emphasize impartiality and the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. Popular cause priorities within effective altruism include global health and development, social and economic inequality ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
