Peter Singer, a renowned—and for some, reviled—Australian philosopher, is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. His new book (a shorter edition was published in 2016) consists of 90 brief essays on a wide range of issues within philosophy, ethics, bioethics, science and technology, politics, ecology, national and global public health and environmental policy, and even space colonization. As Singer explains in the Introduction (p. xvi), all of the essays contained in the original edition have been “fully updated” based on subsequent developments, research, and data, and this “expanded” edition includes 37 new essays addressing ethical issues related to more recent events and scientific developments, including the genetic modification of human embryos for various purposes, artificial intelligence, the COVID-19 pandemic (mandatory lockdowns and vaccination policies), the 2017 neo-Nazi white supremacist march in Charlottesville and the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and protests and riots that followed, the conservative political backlash in various countries stemming from the mass migration of refugees, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine (and the specter of nuclear war arising from it). The reference in the subtitle to “Things That Matter” alludes to Derek Parfit’s multi-volume magnum opus,
On What Matters (2011 and 2017), which Singer believes persuasively established that there are “objective ethical truths that we can discover through careful reasoning and reflection” (pp. xiv).
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