Peter Singer

Peter Singer wrote recently about the UN human rights council's adoption of a resolution to condemn defamation of religion as a human rights violation. The tag line to the article is "We must defend the right to cause offence to believers, when this is not meant to stir up hatred".

This resolution seems to be a cowardly attempt to calm down religious fundamentalists who can't tolerate hearing opinions divergent to their own. It is a violation of free speech, a human right. The last thing that you would expect the UN human rights council to do is to breach human rights, but there you have it. Tisk, tisk, tisk.

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} This Wednesday (the 4^th), Peter Singer, influential Australian ethicist and philosopher, gave a talk on reducing world poverty, the subject of his most recent book “

I have been a lacto ovo vegetarian for almost 3 years, and have recently been considering the ethical arguments for such a position. Alan has almost finished Peter Singer's book "The Ethics of What We Eat", and I am making my way through it. Singer outlines the processes and conditions of factory farmed animals, pointing out that if abboitoirs had glass walls, there would be far more vegetarians. The processes and conditions that sentient animals such as cows, pigs and chickens suffer through is horrific, and at times just the thought made me feel physically ill.