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“... leg of X or the endangered toe of Y, who has already lost a leg? Those are two of the variations Peter Singer puts forward on the exam question that used to ask whether, in a fire of just such severity as to let you rescue one and no more, you would plump for your grandparent, your grandchild or the Titian that so surprisingly shared houseroom with ...”

“... to broach the subject. Today, by contrast, a scarred identity earns almost universal respect. Peter Singer’s Pushing Time Away reflects this shift. He used to be, he says, far too busy writing his philosophy to bother with his grandfather. It was only when he noticed an affinity between his work on ‘practical ethics’ and his maternal ...”

“... I have been persuaded of the rightness of the moral position advocated in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation for the past twenty years. There is, in my view, no moral justification whatever for the human exploitation of animals. I was convinced of this principally by reading the path-breaking book, Animals Men and Morals (1971), edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris ...”

“... problems that should be addressed by theories both of personal morality and of global justice. Peter Unger argues that we are culpably indifferent to this misery, and that our daily thinking about our duty to others is marked by self-serving irrationality. We typically believe that we do have a moral duty to rescue others who are at risk, especially where ...”

“... time as MacAskill and Ord started their work), The Life You Can Save (founded by the philosopher Peter Singer), Good Ventures (founded by the Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who have pledged to give away most of their money), Animal Charity Evaluators (an 80,000 Hours spin-off) and the Open Philanthropy Project (a ...”

“... in keeping one’s historical distance from the master in question. The last of these five titles, Peter Singer’s Marx, is a somewhat hasty little book. Marx is obviously an exceptionally difficult figure for such a study. His work ranges so widely. It is concerned so directly and so urgently with intricate practical affairs; and it is so decisively ...”

“... problem of the special moral significance of specifically human life which has led Michael Tooley, Peter Singer and James Rachels to some of their more bizarre views about the moral equality of the higher animals and some human beings. These are deep theoretical problems, which will not easily be solved. What is remarkable about these philosophers and ...”

“... after when Tony Hadley arrived to sing Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’. Hadley, the Thatcherite singer in an otherwise left-leaning band, was holding a glass of Jack Daniels. He seemed in touch with his audience and every bit as drunk. I’m not sure whether the audience knew his politics, but they heard the totemic sound of the 1980s in his voice, and a ...”

“... a desire to save my soul.’ Four scholars were invited to reply to Coetzee – Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Barbara Smuts and Wendy Doniger – and all of them struggled in different ways to read his meanings. Singer seemed to suggest that Coetzee’s device was fundamentally evasive. ‘It’s a marvellous ...”

“... and defending our special concern for our fellow humans. Williams wonders mischievously whether Peter Singer, a leading critic of such ‘speciesism’, feels uncomfortable about his position as a professor at Princeton’s Center for Human Values: ‘I should have thought it would have sounded to him rather like a Center for Aryan ...”

“... farming’. The horrors they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of Farmageddon are its global reach ...”

“... makes it difficult to avoid this conclusion, and it is accepted by some utilitarians, like Peter Singer. There are so many people you could save, each at a modest cost. Scanlon mentions this problem without offering an unqualified answer, but here is a suggestion. While no one could reasonably reject some requirement of aid from the affluent to ...”

“... precisely the epithets with which McMahan’s book has been greeted – ‘novel and ingenious’, Peter Singer tells us on the dust-jacket, rather than, say, ‘wise and insightful’. McMahan’s ‘Sacrificial Newborn’, with which we began (my title, not his; strangely, it doesn’t appear in his index), is a case in point. Its sole rationale is to ...”

“... the giant panda of Sichuan Province in China. Schaller’s principles and practices inspired Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. He is a big-game biologist, a student of spectacular individuals in nature rather than a toiler at the overlooked and the unindividuated: ‘An animal must provide an emotional experience if I am to involve myself in its ...”

“... wants a collection of tales from her, not a single story that has been overdressed. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Mazel and Schli-mazel also lives well by words alone. There is no feeling that Singer was constrained by his memory of the version of the story he was told by his mother as a child; rather, that he then learnt how to ...”