Can We Justify Killing Animals For Food?

Is it right to kill animals for food? And if it's wrong, how wrong is it? Could and should Western society ever change its views?  Four philosophers share their views with BBC Radio 4's Analysis programme.  Peter Singer: Our future selves will consider meat eating to be barbaric  Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and the author of Animal Liberation.

http://tinyurl.com/obo7ntj

The World's Most Famous Utilitarian on Animal Rights

Most philosophers dream of having one big, deeply influential idea. Peter Singer has had three. His 1975 book Animal Liberation served as the founding text of the animal rights movement, and provided a powerful ethical rationale for vegetarianism. In Practical Ethics and Rethinking Life and Death, he challenged traditional ideas about personhood and offered a vigorous defense of abortion and, in some cases, infanticide. His 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" used a simple thought experiment to back up a powerful conclusion: people in rich countries, he thinks, are morally obligated give away a big portion of their income to poor people in the developing world.

http://tinyurl.com/porm4tr

Abuse of Animals Won’t Stop Until We Stop Eating Meat

When Animal Liberation was published, I hoped that, 40 years on, there would be no more slaughterhouses – and therefore no more newspaper stories about atrocities like the one at an abattoir in the north of England. The arguments against our oppression of animals seemed to me so clear and irrefutable that surely a powerful movement would arise, consigning these abuses to history, as the anti-slavery movement had put an end to the African slave trade.

http://tinyurl.com/nvzq54b