Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another rac...
Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is.
Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant s...
Now that we have understood the nature of speciesism and seen the consequences it has for nonhuman animals it is time to ask: What can we do about it? There are many things that we can and should do a...
No society has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled... to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials...
In the former, Kant pictured man as a being capable of following a rational moral law, but also liable to be swayed from it by the non-rational desires which have their origin in our physical nature....
If you are paying for something to drink when safe drinking water comes out of the tap, you have money to spend on things you don’t really need.
If we can prevent something bad, without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.
I couldn’t care less about politics, the culture wars. My only interest is to get people to care about Darfurs and Rwandas.
I argued against the view that the only obligation we have to strangers is to avoid harming them; but even if we were to take that view, the facts of climate change would demonstrate clearly that we a...
Everyone has boundaries. If you find yourself doing something that makes you bitter, it is time to reconsider. Is
Ben West, one of the effective altruists mentioned in chapter 4, has shown that even if your goal were solely to slow down climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, you could do that more e...
Ben West points out that even from a selfish perspective, earning to give allows you to have things that people believe make them happy, like money and a high-status job, while still getting the fulfi...
Being a bystander to suffering is not an option.
So, basically, my view is I don't want to support the exploitation of animals, and within reason, I will do what I can to avoid it, but it's not like it's a religion for me. It's not like I consider I...
We have a new generation of very rich people who want to do more with their money than buy a lot of expensive toys. They want to live meaningful lives.
They took this as a law of nature, a self-evident necessary truth. On the contrary, says Marx, it bears the stamp of a society ‘in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of...
When we use animals to convert crops into meat, eggs, or milk, the animals use most of the food value to keep warm and develop bones and other parts we can’t eat. Most of the food value of the crops w...
What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have.
We have still not answered the question of when an experiment might be justifiable. It will not do to say Never! Putting morality in such black-and-white terms is appealing, because it eliminates the...