There is no doubt that there is a huge difference between human and nonhuman animals. But what we are overlooking is the fact that nonhuman animals are conscious beings, that they can suffer.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the consciousness and suffering of nonhuman animals, emphasizing their moral significance.
Peter Singer's quote urges us to recognize the fundamental differences between humans and nonhuman animals, but it also calls attention to the shared capacity for consciousness and the ability to experience suffering amongst nonhuman beings. This perspective challenges us to reconsider our ethical responsibilities toward animals and to acknowledge their value as sentient beings deserving of consideration and compassion.
In practice
In a debate about animal rights, highlighting this quote can illustrate the moral implications of animal suffering.
The belief that the animals exist because God created them - and that he created them so we can better meet our needs - is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all.
Pain and suffering are in themselves bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the being that suffers. How bad a pain is depends on how intense it is and how long it lasts, but pain of the same intensity and duration are equally bad, whether felt by humans or animals.
What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or rational argument, that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.
Almost everybody accepts that some people can be killed. 'The concept of 'brain death' - the belief that people on respirators can legitimately be killed - shows that.
If we all think only of our own interests, we are headed for collective disaster - just look at what we are doing to our planet's climate.
Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations about honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by sex.)
When religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.
As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.
Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left? We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance. The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life.
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