Peter Singer

Peter Singer (born in Melbourne in 1946) is an Australian philosopher who has devoted most of his work to applied ethics from a secular, utilitarian standpoint. His name is tied to the defence of animals and to effective altruism, two movements his ideas helped to shape. He has taught at Monash University and at Princeton, and his writing is among the most widely read and debated in contemporary moral philosophy.

He was born to Viennese Jewish parents who emigrated to Australia in 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, and several relatives died in the Holocaust. His maternal grandfather, the educator and psychologist David Ernst Oppenheim, was murdered at Theresienstadt. Singer studied law, history and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1967, and then won a scholarship to Oxford. There he worked under R. M. Hare, whose supervision shaped his thesis on civil disobedience, published in 1973. Around this time a conversation over lunch in Oxford, in which a fellow student explained why he avoided meat, led Singer to become a vegetarian and to rethink his relationship with animals.

After a spell as a visiting professor in New York he returned to Melbourne in 1977 and spent most of his career there. In 1999 he moved to Princeton, where he held the DeCamp chair in bioethics. His best-known book, Animal Liberation (1975), attacked factory farming and speciesism, the practice of discriminating against beings simply for belonging to another species. Singer holds that every being capable of suffering deserves equal consideration, although rights can differ according to each being's interests.

In Practical Ethics (1979) he applies a preference utilitarian framework to questions such as poverty, euthanasia and vegetarianism. His central principle is the equal consideration of interests, which does not mean identical treatment but giving comparable interests the same weight. For Singer, universalising moral reasoning leads to utilitarianism, since one's own interests cannot count for more than those of others. His essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972) argues that people in rich countries should give part of their income to relieve global poverty. That line of thought fed into The Life You Can Save and the effective altruism movement, which he has supported.

His influence reaches moral philosophy, the debate on animal rights and charitable giving. Although his conclusions remain controversial, few contemporary thinkers have prompted so many readers to reconsider their consumption habits and moral intuitions.