Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Singer

Singer is letting the air out of a caricature: that consequentialism is a cold spreadsheet with one fixed answer for every moral dilemma. The line is doing quiet damage control. Yes, the guiding principles are “pretty abstract” - but that’s not a bug, it’s the point. A high-level rule like “do what will have the best consequences” is meant to travel across cases precisely because the world doesn’t cooperate with rigid moral recipes.

The subtext is a defense of flexibility that still wants to look like rigor. Singer concedes what critics love to pounce on: consequentialists don’t “specify what consequences are best” in advance, because the “best” depends on circumstances. That sounds suspiciously like moral hand-waving until you notice the move he’s making: separating levels. At the top sits an evaluative commitment (consequences matter most). Down below, where actual choices happen, pluralism and disagreement are expected - not because morality is arbitrary, but because the inputs are messy: competing goods, uncertainty, different stakeholders, different empirical facts.

Contextually, this sits inside Singer’s larger project of marrying moral philosophy to real-world decision-making (poverty, animal welfare, bioethics). He’s signaling that applied ethics isn’t a betrayal of theory; it’s where theory proves it can survive contact with reality. The “differences” he anticipates are not loopholes but the price of moral seriousness: if you can’t admit that “best” changes with context, you’re not being principled, you’re being doctrinaire. Singer’s wager is that abstraction can discipline moral intuition without pretending to replace judgment.