To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada, while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apertheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the hypocrisy in protesting certain animal rights abuses while ignoring others that one participates in.
Peter Singer's quote underscores the inconsistency in moral outrage; it argues that one cannot selectively condemn certain forms of animal cruelty while simultaneously supporting other practices that inflict suffering on animals. The analogy to apartheid emphasizes that true commitment to justice requires a consistent ethical stance, not just outrage over certain issues that are convenient to condemn.
In practice
During a speech on ethical consumerism, I would reference this quote to illustrate the importance of consistent moral standards.
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.)
It was our view of the worst that could befall our people if they were taken captive. So, what was fascinating to me was that somehow it appears the techniques that we have feared most in the world would be used on our people, we are using on people in our custody.
There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.
The State is concentric, but the individual is eccentric.
The humiliation I go through/when I think of my past/can only be described as grace./We are created by being destroyed.
Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. Then there is the vertical dimension of depth, accessible only through the portal of the present moment.
I thought you were sane," I said, "but you're just as crazy as the rest of them.
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