If penicillin had been judged by its toxicity to guinea pigs, it might never have been used by man.
Interpretation
The effectiveness of an idea or invention should not be dismissed based on its side effects or challenges.
Peter Singer's quote highlights the importance of recognizing the potential benefits of innovations, even when they come with risks or drawbacks. It suggests that if we only focus on the negative aspects, like toxicity in guinea pigs in this case, we may overlook groundbreaking discoveries such as penicillin that have dramatically improved human health.
In practice
In a discussion about new medical treatments and their side effects.
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.)
To decide upon the answer is not scientific. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar ajar only.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense...
There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.
It may be that our cosmic curiosity... is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder.
Man does not limit himself to seeing; he thinks and insists on learning the meaning of phenomena whose existence has been revealed to him by observation. So he reasons, compares facts, puts questions to them, and by the answers which he extracts, tests one by another. This sort of control, by means of reasoning and facts, is what constitutes experiment, properly speaking; and it is the only process that we have for teaching ourselves about the nature of things outside us.
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