#6 — Peter Singer | Utilitarianism and Animals
Within Reason
Alex J O'Connor
4.9 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2019
⏱️ 91 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Peter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher and author of the seminal Animal Liberation, a book credited with initiating the modern animal rights movement. He speaks to Alex about utilitarianism and how we might apply it to all sentient creatures.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of the Cosmic Skeptic podcast is brought to you by you. |
| 0:04.8 | To support the podcast, please visit Patreon.com |
| 0:08.0 | forward slash Cosmic Skeptic. Oh, So welcome back everybody to the Cosmic Skeptic podcast an opportunity to |
| 0:38.8 | break away from the normal snappyest style of videos and have more |
| 0:41.5 | long-form conversations with interesting guests. |
| 0:44.1 | And joining me today in the studio is Peter Singer, who has held professorships at both the University |
| 0:49.3 | of Princeton and Melbourne, and specialises in practical ethics and is well known for his books, including and most famously Animal Liberation Redden in 1975, which is thought by many to have |
| 1:05.4 | kick-started the modern vegan movement and animal rights movement. |
| 1:10.7 | So thanks for joining us today. |
| 1:12.1 | Professor to be with you around it. It's great to have you here. |
| 1:14.0 | And I think a lot of people are going to be excited because it's only fairly recently that I began to talk about animal ethics on my channel and people were kind of surprised by it. |
| 1:22.0 | And I want to talk about why |
| 1:25.7 | my audience should begin to see animal ethics seriously because a lot of people |
| 1:31.2 | see it as a kind of I don't know if you found this as a lot of people see it as a kind of, I don't know if you found this, as a kind of interesting philosophical debate, |
| 1:36.0 | like it's kind of brought up in a Q&A section and the philosophers on stage kind of laugh about it, have a bit of a chat, |
| 1:41.0 | think it's interesting and then kind of push it to the side. |
| 1:44.0 | But do you find that people don't take it as seriously as they should be? |
| 1:47.0 | Because that's something that I've tended to notice. |
| 1:49.0 | I think it's part of the problem that in writing about animal ethics I wanted to push back against the idea |
| 1:57.4 | that humans are the only thing that matters which admittedly was a view that I held for the first 23, 24 years of my life, which is quite a long time nowadays, to think not really have thought about that issue. |
| 2:12.0 | But the attitude that this can't be as important |
| 2:15.5 | as issues about humans was around then and it's still around, which just shows that I think |
... |
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