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| 📕10-word summary: Influential philosopher contemplates complex life questions from an ethical perspective. 🖌6-word review: Very thought-provoking, but ultimately dated material. |
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| Description:* In this book of brief essays, Peter Singer applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and ways of increasing happiness. Singer asks whether chimpanzees are people, smoking should be outlawed, or consensual sex between adult siblings should be decriminalized, and he reiterates his case against the idea that all human life is sacred, applying his arguments to some recent cases in the news. In addition, he explores, in an easily accessible form, some of the deepest philosophical questions, such as whether anything really matters and what is the value of the pale blue dot that is our planet. The collection also includes some more personal reflections, like Singer’s thoughts on one of his favorite activities, surfing, and an unusual suggestion for starting a family conversation over a holiday feast.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: It’s been a long time since I’ve read a “cerebral” book, of which this one definitely qualified. Several times I had to read a sentence two or three times to parse and understand it. The questions explored were very heavy and fascinating. The downside of the book was that the date of each essay was different, including different years with almost all 10 or more years ago, and in an an essay it would say things like, “this week… such-and-such a thing happened,” but you didn’t know what year it was. And along those same lines, because the essays were so old, a lot of the things posited as possibly happening in the future, we already know don’t play out that way. It looks like there was an updated version of the book printed in 2023, with 8 more essays in it. I probably should have read that version. | |||||||||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.