Lunchbox/Soapbox: Peter Singer – Why We Need a Beef Tax
The 2010 season launches with a contribution from noted contrarian and celebrated thinker Peter Singer:
Why We Need a Beef Tax
Taxes can do a lot of good. They pay for schools, parks, police and hospitals. But that’s not all they can do. High taxes on cigarettes have saved many lives. And when it comes to commodities that should be taxed, we’ve been ignoring the cow in the room.
From health reasons to cruelty to animals to global warming, the arguments for a Beef Tax are compelling. It’s time for meat eaters to pay for the harm they do.
And this is just the first of our regular lunchtime gatherings.
Lunchbox/Soapbox is a simple idea; an old-fashioned Speakers’ Corner in the middle of the city, in the middle of the day.
At the Wheeler Centre we’re keen to showcase our writers as thinkers and as artists, as people with passions and peccadilloes. So we’ve come up with Lunchbox/Soapbox: a weekly space for them to sound off on a topic of their choice. Think of it as a 20-minute piece of polemic to give lunching CBD folk something to chew on.
The themes will be idiosyncratic: from pop-cultural analysis to high cultural criticism; from political grandstanding to personal mischief-making. But they’ll all be thought-provoking. Bring your lunch along to this bite-sized session.
Featuring
Featuring
Australian philosopher Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and the recipient of the Berggruen Prize for ideas that shape human self-understanding. He is the author of more than twenty books, including The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason) and The Mo... Read more
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