Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Singer

Singer is letting a small, almost throwaway word do heavy moral work: "instantly". In a networked world, the lag between knowing and affecting collapses. You see a crisis, you click donate, you share a link, you buy a product that props up a supply chain, you ignore a story that then sinks under the algorithm. For Singer, this is not just a description of technology; it is a pressure test for our ethical excuses. Distance used to be a moral buffer. Now the buffer is gone, and the fact that we can reach across the planet in seconds makes inaction feel less like neutrality and more like a choice with consequences.

The syntax mirrors the thought: qualifying, looping, careful ("more or less", "in some way"), as if he's anticipating the common pushback that our individual actions are negligible. Singer's subtext is that "negligible" is increasingly indefensible. When coordination costs are low and information is abundant, the threshold for responsibility drops. Not responding is still participating in the system that decides what gets attention, funding, and political will.

Contextually, this fits Singer's long project: dragging ethics out of the private realm of intentions and into the public realm of outcomes. Effective altruism, consumer complicity, bystander apathy, the moral relevance of strangers - this line stitches them together. The quote works because it reframes modern connectivity as moral proximity: the world is not just smaller; it's harder to pretend we didn't touch it.