Why this holiday season is a great time to rethink the traditional turkey feast

A turkey is the centerpiece of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Yet most of us know almost nothing about today's specially bred, commercially produced birds. In this brief book, bestselling author Peter Singer tells their story--and, unfortunately, it's not a happy one. Along the way, he also offers a brief history of the turkey and its consumption, ridicules the annual U.S. presidential pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey, and introduces us to a tremendously handsome, outgoing, and intelligent turkey named Cornelius. Above all, Singer explains how we can improve our holiday tables--for turkeys, people, and the planet--by liberating ourselves from the traditional turkey feast. In its place, he encourages us to consider trying a vegetarian alternative--or just serving the side dishes that many people already enjoy far more than turkey. Complete with some delicious recipes for turkey-free holiday feasting, Consider the Turkey will make you reconsider what you serve for your next holiday meal--or even tomorrow's dinner.

Singer's argument is powerful, provocative and, I think, basically right. The world would be a better place if we were as tough-minded in how we donate money as in how we make it.--Nicholas Kristof, New York Times

Bold, fresh, inspired, reasoned, optimistic.--Walter M. Bortz II, MD, Huffington Post Blog

Peter Singer's books and ideas have been disturbing our complacency ever since the appearance of Animal Liberation. Now he directs our attention to a new movement in which his own ideas have played a crucial role: effective altruism. Effective altruism is built upon the simple but profound idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good you can do. Such a life requires an unsentimental view of charitable giving: to be a worthy recipient of our support, an organization must be able to demonstrate that it will do more good with our money or our time than other options open to us. Singer introduces us to an array of remarkable people who are restructuring their lives in accordance with these ideas, and shows how living altruistically often leads to greater personal fulfillment than living for oneself.

The Most Good You Can Do develops the challenges Singer has made, in the New York Times and Washington Post, to those who donate to the arts, and to charities focused on helping our fellow citizens, rather than those for whom we can do the most good. Effective altruists are extending our knowledge of the possibilities of living less selfishly, and of allowing reason, rather than emotion, to determine how we live. The Most Good You Can Do offers new hope for our ability to tackle the world's most pressing problems.

Provocative essays on real-world ethical questions from the world's most influential philosopher

Peter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. He is also one of its most controversial. The author of important books such as Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, Rethinking Life and Death, and The Life You Can Save, he helped launch the animal rights and effective altruism movements and contributed to the development of bioethics. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words.

In this book of brief essays, he 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.

Provocative and original, these essays will challenge--and possibly change--your beliefs about a wide range of real-world ethical questions.

In this Tenth Anniversary Edition of The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer brings his landmark book up to date. In addition to restating his compelling arguments about how we should respond to extreme poverty, he examines the progress we are making and recounts how the first edition transformed the lives both of readers and the people they helped. Learn how you can be part of the solution, doing good for others while adding fulfillment to your own life.

THE UPDATED CLASSIC OF THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, NOW WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI

The indispensable foundational text for the movement, new and updated with the honesty and philosophical depth characteristic of all of Singer's work. --J.M. Coetzee, author of The Lives of Animals and Disgrace

Peter Singer may be the most controversial philosopher alive; he is certainly among the most influential.--The New Yorker

Few books maintain their relevance - and have remained continuously in print - nearly 50 years after they were first published. Animal Liberation, one of TIME's All-TIME 100 Best Non-Fiction Books is one such book. Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of people to the existence of speciesism--our systematic disregard of nonhuman animals--inspiring a worldwide movement to transform our attitudes to animals and eliminate the cruelty we inflict on them. In Animal Liberation Now, Singer exposes the chilling realities of today's factory farms and product-testing procedures, destroying the spurious justifications behind them and showing us just how woefully we have been misled.

Now, for the first time since its original publication, Singer returns to the major arguments and examples and brings us to the current moment. This edition, revised from top to bottom, covers important reforms in the European Union, and now in various U.S. states, but on the flip side, Singer shows us the impact of the huge expansion of factory farming due to the exploding demand for animal products in China. Further, meat consumption is taking a toll on the environment, and factory farms pose a profound risk for spreading new viruses even worse than COVID-19.

Animal Liberation Now includes alternatives to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. An important and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency, and justice, it is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike.

A most important book that will change the way many of us look at animals--and, ultimately, at ourselves. -- Chicago Tribune

Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of people to the existence of speciesism--our systematic disregard of nonhuman animals--inspiring a worldwide movement to transform our attitudes to animals and eliminate the cruelty we inflict on them.

In Animal Liberation, author Peter Singer exposes the chilling realities of today's factory farms and product-testing procedures--destroying the spurious justifications behind them, and offering alternatives to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. An important and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency, and justice, it is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike.

About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam

For the first time in history, eradicating world poverty is within our reach. Yet around the world, a billion people struggle to live each day on less than many of us pay for bottled water. In The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer uses ethical arguments, illuminating examples, and case studies of charitable giving to show that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but morally indefensible. The Life You Can Save teaches us to be a part of the solution, helping others as we help ourselves.

An unlikely duo--Professor Peter Singer, a preeminent philosopher and professor of bioethics, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist monastic and social activist--join forces to talk ethics in lively conversations that cross oceans, overcome language barriers, and bridge philosophies. The eye-opening dialogues collected here share unique perspectives on contemporary issues like animal welfare, gender equality, the death penalty, and more. Together, these two deep thinkers explore the foundation of ethics and key Buddhist concepts, and ultimately reveal how we can all move toward making the world a better place.

The Ethics of What We Eat explores the impact our food choices have on humans, animals, and the environment. Recognizing that not all of us will become vegetarians, Singer and Mason offer ways to make healthful, humane food choices. As they point out: You can be ethical without being fanatical.

Even before the publication of his seminal Animal Liberation in 1975, Peter Singer, one of the greatest moral philosophers of our time, unflinchingly challenged the ethics of eating animals. Now, in Why Vegan?, Singer brings together the most consequential essays of his career to make this devastating case against our failure to confront what we are doing to animals, to public health, and to our planet.

From his 1973 manifesto for Animal Liberation to his personal account of becoming a vegetarian in The Oxford Vegetarians and to investigating the impact of meat on global warming, Singer traces the historical arc of the animal rights, vegetarian, and vegan movements from their embryonic days to today, when climate change and global pandemics threaten the very existence of humans and animals alike. In his introduction and in The Two Dark Sides of COVID-19, cowritten with Paola Cavalieri, Singer excoriates the appalling health hazards of Chinese wet markets--where thousands of animals endure almost endless brutality and suffering--but also reminds westerners that they cannot blame China alone without also acknowledging the perils of our own factory farms, where unimaginably overcrowded sheds create the ideal environment for viruses to mutate and multiply.

Spanning more than five decades of writing on the systemic mistreatment of animals, Why Vegan? features a topical new introduction, along with nine other essays, including:

- An Ethical Way of Treating Chickens?, which opens our eyes to the lives of the birds who end up on so many plates--and to the lives of their parents;
- If Fish Could Scream, an essay exposing the utter indifference of commercial fishing practices to the experiences of the sentient beings they scoop from the oceans in such unimaginably vast numbers;
- The Case for Going Vegan, in which Singer assembles his most powerful case for boycotting the animal production industry;
- And most recently, in the introduction to this book and in The Two Dark Sides of COVID-19, Singer points to a new reason for avoiding meat: the role eating animals has played, and will play, in pandemics past, present, and future.

Written in Singer's pellucid prose, Why Vegan? asserts that human tyranny over animals is a wrong comparable to racism and sexism. The book ultimately becomes an urgent call to reframe our lives in order to redeem ourselves and alter the calamitous trajectory of our imperiled planet.

What is ethics? Where do moral standards come from? Are they based on emotions, reason, or some innate sense of right and wrong? For many scientists, the key lies entirely in biology--especially in Darwinian theories of evolution and self-preservation. But if evolution is a struggle for survival, why are we still capable of altruism?

In his classic study The Expanding Circle, Peter Singer argues that altruism began as a genetically based drive to protect one's kin and community members but has developed into a consciously chosen ethic with an expanding circle of moral concern. Drawing on philosophy and evolutionary psychology, he demonstrates that human ethics cannot be explained by biology alone. Rather, it is our capacity for reasoning that makes moral progress possible. In a new afterword, Singer takes stock of his argument in light of recent research on the evolution of morality.

In this new edition, Singer explores whether Marx remains relevant to the twenty-first century, and if so, how. Does the fact that eight billionaires now own as much as the bottom half of the world's population give support to Marxist thinking? Does the ease with which conservative politicians can win over working class voters by appealing to nationalism undermines Marx's view of class struggle and the inevitability of victory for the proletariat? Singer ponders key questions such as these, and also discusses the place of the internet as a productive force when analyzed in Marxist theory. He concludes with an assessment of Marx's legacy, asking if there is any realistic prospect of replacing capitalism with a better system of production and distribution in the twenty-first century.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

As Bill and Melinda Gates observe in their foreword, in the age of today's global philanthropy, Singer's essay is as relevant now as it ever was. This attractively packaged, concise edition collects the original article, two of Singer's more recent popular writings on our obligations to others around the world, and a new introduction by Singer that discusses his current thinking.

THE UPDATED CLASSIC OF THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, NOW WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI

The indispensable foundational text for the movement, new and updated with the honesty and philosophical depth characteristic of all of Singer's work. --J.M. Coetzee, author of The Lives of Animals and Disgrace

Peter Singer may be the most controversial philosopher alive; he is certainly among the most influential.--The New Yorker

Few books maintain their relevance - and have remained continuously in print - nearly 50 years after they were first published. Animal Liberation, one of TIME's All-TIME 100 Best Non-Fiction Books is one such book. Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of people to the existence of speciesism--our systematic disregard of nonhuman animals--inspiring a worldwide movement to transform our attitudes to animals and eliminate the cruelty we inflict on them. In Animal Liberation Now, Singer exposes the chilling realities of today's factory farms and product-testing procedures, destroying the spurious justifications behind them and showing us just how woefully we have been misled.

Now, for the first time since its original publication, Singer returns to the major arguments and examples and brings us to the current moment. This edition, revised from top to bottom, covers important reforms in the European Union, and now in various U.S. states, but on the flip side, Singer shows us the impact of the huge expansion of factory farming due to the exploding demand for animal products in China. Further, meat consumption is taking a toll on the environment, and factory farms pose a profound risk for spreading new viruses even worse than COVID-19.

Animal Liberation Now includes alternatives to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. An important and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency, and justice, it is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike.

The new commandments according to Rethinking Life and Death.
--If you must take human life, take responsibility for the consequences of your decisions.
--All human life is not of equal worth; treat beings in accordance to the ethical situation at hand.
--Respect a person's desire to live or die.
A profound and provocative work, Rethinking Life and Death, in the tradition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, examines the ethical dilemmas that confront us as we near the twenty-first century.