Politics & Power Quote by Peter Singer

Singer’s line has the calm, managerial tone of someone describing a weather system that just happens to be moral philosophy. The key move is the softening: “as we realize” implies the facts will do the persuading, that globalization will usher in ethical globalization almost by default. It’s a strategically modest claim, but it smuggles in a radical demand. If “more and more things have global impact” is granted - climate, pandemics, supply chains, migration, AI - then “purely national interest” starts to sound not just parochial but cognitively outdated, like insisting on town borders during a flood.

The subtext is Singer’s signature cosmopolitan utilitarianism: moral concern should track the scope of consequences, not the accident of citizenship. He doesn’t argue here; he forecasts. That forecast functions as pressure. If you resist, you’re positioned as someone refusing to “realize” what reality is already teaching.

Context matters: Singer has spent decades prodding comfortable audiences to widen the circle of obligation, from famine relief to animal suffering. This sentence plugs that older ethical project into contemporary systems thinking. It also nods to political feasibility: people “wanting to get away” frames cosmopolitanism as a growing desire rather than an imposed duty, a way to make a demanding moral shift feel like a trend.

Still, the phrase “purely national interest” is carefully chosen. It doesn’t deny nations legitimate concerns; it targets exclusivity. Singer’s bet is that interdependence will make moral nationalism look less like loyalty and more like bad accounting.