Art & Creativity Quote by Peter Singer

Singer’s voice here is the understated alarm of someone watching a thought experiment crawl off the page and into policy. The phrasing is almost bureaucratically calm - “confirmed suspicions,” “made clearer” - but that restraint is the point. He’s signaling that what once sounded like a speculative ethical edge case now has real-world fingerprints: governments, security bureaucracies, and public opinion moving torture from the realm of taboo to the realm of “debate.”

The subtext is less “I was right” than “you’re now living inside the argument.” Singer is known for yanking moral questions out of comfortable abstractions and forcing a cost-benefit reckoning. When he mentions “a section… where I talk about the possibility of torture,” he’s reminding readers that philosophy isn’t just armchair sport; it can become an instruction manual if the culture goes looking for permission. In the post-9/11 era, especially, “torture” became a word people tried to launder through hypotheticals (the ticking-time-bomb scenario) and euphemisms (“enhanced interrogation”). Singer’s line quietly frames that shift as a kind of moral contagion: once you grant “possibility,” you’ve already started normalizing the practice.

Context matters because Singer’s utilitarian reputation makes his warning sharper. Critics often fear that consequence-based ethics can be bent to justify atrocities under pressure. Here, he’s both anticipating that misuse and documenting its arrival. The rhetorical modesty - “I suppose,” “for instance” - reads like a philosopher’s caution, but it lands as an indictment of a society eager to turn emergencies into permanent exceptions.