Living with meaning
Gender, race, sexual orientation, religion and disability are topics that can easily cause offence. And it’s about time, say those who believe that discrimination has gone on so long that a backlash is overdue.
The result is “cancel culture”, where support is withdrawn from public figures after they say or do something considered offensive. Although it’s often associated with the US or UK, Aotearoa also has plenty of examples, such as in 2020, when SkyCity cancelled a talk by moral philosopher Peter Singer.
The professor of bioethics at Princeton University has been described as the world’s most influential living philosopher. He is considered by many to be the father of the animal liberation movement, and of the social movement known as “effective altruism”. Last year, he was awarded the US$1 million Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, an annual prize for “thinkers whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world”. He donated the money to charities.
But Singer has also been described as “the most dangerous man on Earth” by Not Dead Yet, a US disability-rights group opposed to euthanasia. That was because of his explorations, from the late 1970s, of the morality of
