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Book: The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
Quotes of Book: The Life You Can Save: Acting
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  1. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    Is the fact that other people are not doing their fair share a sufficient reason for allowing a child to die when you could easily rescue that child? I think the answer is clear: No. The others have, by refusing to help with the rescue, made themselves irrelevant. They might as well be so many rocks. According to the fair-share view, in fact, it would be better for the children if they were rocks, because then you would be obliged to wade back into the pond to save another child."
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  2. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    I couldn't care less about politics, the culture wars. My only interest is to get people to care about Darfurs and Rwandas.
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  3. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    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 we have grown is wasted-in the case of cattle, we get back only 1 pound of beef for every 13 pounds of grain we feed them. With pigs the ratio is 6 pounds of grain to 1 pound of pork. And even these figures underestimate the waste, because meat has a higher water content than grain.30 The world is not running out of food. The problem is that we-the relatively affluent-have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible, if we were to eat the crops we grow directly.
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  4. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    the deaths of children in poor countries from diarrhea, measles, and malaria have become part of the background of the world we live in, and if we know about it at all, we are likely to believe that it is a problem that will always be with us. But that isn't so. In the last two years, we have saved a million children. In the coming years, if we all give substantially more, we can save the entire 8.8 million.
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  5. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    I guess basically one wants to feel that one's life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one's done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?
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  6. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    In the United States, 97 percent of those classified by the Census Bureau as poor own a color TV.
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  7. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    There is a new wave of interest in exploring how to frame choices so that people make better decisions. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, professors of economics and law, respectively, teamed up to write Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which advocates using defaults to nudge us to make better choices.9 Even when we are choosing in our own interests, we often choose unwisely. When employees have the option of participating in a retirement-savings scheme, many do not, despite the financial advantages of doing so. If their employer instead automatically enrolls them, giving them the choice of opting out, participation jumps dramatically
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  8. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    ...moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.
    book-quotephilosophymoral-philosophy

  9. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    A majority of people in these surveys also said that America gives too much aid--but when they were asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid 'cut' to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!
    book-quotepovertyethicsmoral-philosophy

  10. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.
    book-quotemoralityevolutionevolutionary-psychology

  11. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    Putting yourself in the place of others...is what thinking ethically is all about.
    book-quoteethicsmoral-philosophy

  12. Peter Singer _ The Life You Can Save: Acting

    In the past 20 years alone, it adds up to more death than were caused by all the civil and international wars adn government repression of the entire twentieth century, the century of Hitler and Stalin. How much would we give to prevent those horrors? Yet how little are we doing to prevent today's even larger toll and all the misery that it involves? I believe that if you read this book to the end, and look honestly and carefully at our situation, assessing both the facts and the ethical arguments, you will agree that we must act.
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