Talk:Peter Singer

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Important

Peter Singer is an academic philosopher with controversial views on many subjects, including effective altruism, animal liberation, and disabled infants. The Wikipedia article is intended to describe his philosophical views and reasoned criticisms of those views without taking sides. If you came here to say that you disapprove of Peter Singer or to object to some aspect of his views, please read the talk archive before making any changes.

Animal Liberation Section

I think it is strange to give "Animal Liberation" its own section while putting all of his other views under the "Applied Ethics" section. If the goal is to give a separate section to his most influential writings, then "Affluence, Morality, and Poverty" should have a separate section as well. Alternatively, if we want to put all of his views under the "Applied Ethics" section, then we ought to merge "Animal Liberation" with the subsection on veganism and food consumption. If there are no objections to that, I will make that change.

Removed sentence

I have removed the following sentence from the end of the section titled 'Animal Liberation':

"Acceptable vivisection would be weakly "speciesist" insofar as it passes over human candidates for non-human subjects, but arguably species membership in such cases would be a legitimate tie-breaking consideration."

I think Singer has said that we should generally prefer to use animals over 'marginal' humans for experiments because of the feelings of their families, but this is not speciesist as it has nothing to do with the species to which they belong. As for the claim that species membership would be 'a legitimate tie-breaking consideration' this seems to contradict almost everything Singer has written on the subject in the last thirty years.