Name: Practical ethics
ISBN: 9780521707688

Practical ethics

For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters, and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research, and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live.

What Hacker News says

Jun8Jan 2025

Peter Singer, mentioned in the article has a great (and influential) book published in 1979 called Practical Ethics, if you’re interested in this topic you should definitely check that out.

If you’ve never listened to the Philosophy Bites podcast, here’s a relevant episode on the status of animals:https://philosophybites.libsyn.com/christine-korsgaard-on-th...

Also here’s a thought: unnecessary harming of an entity is bad for its effect on you, ie one should refrain from killing an insect even if it did not feel pain. Same holds for a nice rock formation.

thread

skissaneApr 2023

My own personal introduction to philosophy came from Edwards and Pap's now rather dated 1965 textbook A Modern Introduction to Philosophy–my father did an introduction to philosophy course at university in the late 1960s, and that was the main textbook they used, and teenage me was rather excited to discover it on his bookshelf. I myself did 1st year philosophy at university in 2000, but only one unit (logic) actually had a textbook, the others I did (epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, political philosophy) just used photocopied books of readings (I remember we had readings from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, Kant–and some more recent authors whose names escape me now). I found a site with a whole set of free university-level philosophy textbooks – https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/philosophy – although I can't vouch for them since I haven't read any of them myself

Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them

thread

bjoliMar 2022

Practical ethics by Peter Singer. It made me question a lot of my truths and habits and, in the end, made me more happy about how I live my life.

thread

yborisDec 2020

I strongly recommend reading Peter Singer.

His Practical Ethics [0] and other books are excellent.

Primarily, I think it's important to very seriously think about our moral obligations to others, especially in today's interconnected world (where we not only can, but inevitably do affect others whether we like it or not).

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/0521...

thread

guerrillaOct 2020

Where to read up on ethics, you mean? Start with introductory textbooks and then move on to SEP or directly to papers (which both your texts and SEP will reference.)

You could start with this list [1] of resources. I'd like to add Practical Ethics by Peter Singer.

https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/wiki/readinglist#wiki_mo...

thread

yborisApr 2020

Whenever it comes to philosophy, I always recommend Peter Singer -- just about anything by him is great. Consider Practical Ethics [1], or the recently-released-free The Life You Can Save 10th anniversary edition [2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/0521...

[2] https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/the-book/

thread