More often there’s a compromise between ethics and expediency.
Category Archive: Peter Singer
Animals, or at least those who are conscious and capable of suffering or enjoying their lives, are not things for us to use in whatever way we find convenient.
Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.
We tend to think that people are more to blame for their acts than for their omissions.
I think I get angry when people cause serious suffering or don’t alleviate suffering when they could.
If somebody has an extreme amount of wealth and is not using it for some good purpose, only for their own enjoyment or satisfaction, then clearly there’s a moral failing in the world in which we live.
There is no excuse for keeping wild animals in amusement parks or circuses. Until our governments take action, we should avoid supporting places where captive wild animals perform for our amusement. If the public will not pay to see them, the businesses that profit from keeping animals captive will not be able to continue.
There is no doubt that the world economy is in trouble. But if governments or individuals use this as an excuse to reduce assistance to the world’s poorest people, they will only multiply the seriousness of the problem for the world as a whole.
Most of the robots being developed for home use are functional in design – Gecko’s homecare robot looks rather like the Star Wars robot R2-D2. Honda and Sony are designing robots that look more like the same movie’s ‘android’ C-3PO.
It was wrong to capture wild animals and confine them in captivity for people to go and gawk at them. And that’s basically how zoos got started. But once you do that, and once you have animals that have been bred in captivity, you’re really stuck with them in some sense. You can’t return them to the wild.