Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher who is Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer's work specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secular, utilitarian perspective. His book Animal Liberation (1975) criticized intensive animal farming and speciesism, and shaped the animal rights movement. His essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" argues for the moral imperative of donating to help the global poor, using the drowning child analogy. For most of his career he was a preference utilitarian. He revealed in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian. His books The Life You Can Save (2009) and The Most Good You Can Do (2015) are influential in the effective altruism movement.
On two occasions, Singer served as chair of the philosophy department at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996, he stood unsuccessfully as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004, Singer was recognised as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. In 2005 The Sydney Morning Herald placed him among Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals. Singer is a co-founder of Animals Australia and the founder of the non-profit organisation The Life You Can Save.
Early life and education
Peter Albert David Singer was born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, on 6 July 1946. His parents were Austrian Jews who immigrated to Australia from Vienna after Austria's annexation (Anschluss) by Nazi Germany in 1938, and settled in Melbourne. His paternal grandparents were taken by the Nazis to Łódź, and were most likely murdered, since they were never heard from again. His maternal grandfather, the educator and psychologist David Ernst Oppenheim (1881–1943), was murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Oppenheim was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and wrote a joint article with Sigmund Freud, before joining the Adlerian Society for Individual Psychology. Singer later wrote a biography of Oppenheim.
Singer is an atheist and was raised in a prosperous, non-religious family. His father had a successful business importing tea and coffee. His family rarely observed Jewish holidays, and Singer declined to have a bar mitzvah. Singer attended Preshil,Suzannah Pearce, ed. (17 November 2006). "RICHARDSON (Sue) Susan." Who's Who in Australia Live! North Melbourne, Vic: Crown Content Pty Ltd. and later Scotch College. After leaving school, Singer studied law, history, and philosophy as a resident of Ormond College at the University of Melbourne, earning a bachelor's degree in 1967. Singer explained that he elected to major in philosophy after his interest was piqued by discussions with his sister's then-boyfriend. He earned a master's degree for a thesis entitled Why Should I Be Moral? at the same university in 1969. He was awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Oxford and obtained from there a Bachelor of Philosophy in 1971 with a thesis on civil disobedience supervised by R. M. Hare and published as a book in 1973. Singer names Hare, Australian philosopher H. J. McCloskey and British philosopher J. L. H. Thomas, who taught him "how to read and understand Hegel", as his most important mentors.
In the preface to Hegel: A Very Short Introduction, Singer recalls his time in Thomas' "remarkable" classes at Oxford where students were forced to "probe passages of the Phenomenology sentence by sentence, until they yielded their meaning". One day at Balliol College in Oxford, he had what he refers to as probably the formative experience of his life. He was having a discussion after class with fellow graduate student Richard Keshen, who later became a professor at Cape Breton University. During their lunch Keshen opted to have a salad after being told that the spaghetti sauce contained meat. Singer had the spaghetti. Singer eventually questioned Keshen about his reason for avoiding meat. Keshen explained his ethical objections. Singer later stated, "I'd never met a vegetarian who gave such a straightforward answer that I could understand and relate to." Keshen later introduced Singer to his vegetarian friends. Singer was able to find one book in which he could read up on the issue (Animal Machines by Ruth Harrison) and within a week or two he approached his wife saying that he thought they needed to make a change to their diet and that he did not think they could justify eating meat. [In this version of the story, Singer writes of his and his wife's conversion happening "Over the next two months".]
Academic career After spending three years as a Radcliffe lecturer at University College, Oxford, he was a visiting professor at New York University for 16 months, where he influenced the views of James Rachels and Peter Unger about animals and famine. In 1977, he returned to Melbourne where he spent most of his career, aside from appointments as visiting faculty abroad, until his move to Princeton in 1999.Sources:
In June 2011 Singer joined the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London, in addition to his work at Princeton. He gave his last lecture at Princeton in 2023, and has retired. He has been a regular contributor to Project Syndicate since 2001.
According to philosopher Helga Kuhse, Singer is almost certainly the best-known and most widely read of all contemporary philosophers. Michael Specter wrote that Singer is among the most influential of contemporary philosophers. He co-founded the open-access Journal of Controversial Ideas along with the bioethicist Francesca Minerva and the moral philosopher Jeff McMahan in 2018.
Philosophy
Practical Ethics Singer's Practical Ethics (1979) is a book in applied ethics, where he systematically applies a preference utilitarian framework to a wide range of contemporary moral issues, such as equality, global poverty, euthanasia, ethical vegetarianism, environmental ethics, civil disobedience and violence. He challenges readers to reconsider their moral intuitions and to adopt a more rational and consistent ethical stance, often leading to controversial conclusions.
The book analyzes why and how living beings' interests should be weighed. According to Singer, ethics requires an impartial, "universal" perspective and proposes the principle of equal consideration of interests. This does not mean equal treatment, as different interests (e.g., avoiding pain versus cultivating abilities) warrant different treatment, and factors like diminishing marginal utility can affect how similar interests are treated (e.g., a starving person's interest in food over a slightly hungry person's). The fundamental criterion for a being to have interests warranting equal consideration is sentience, defined as the capacity for suffering or happiness. Sentient beings also have interests in developing their abilities, in satisfying basic needs for food and shelter, in enjoying warm personal relationships, in being free to pursue one's projects without interference, "and many others". The conclusion is that one must adopt the course of action that likely maximises the interests of those affected.
Singer's universalising step applies to interests regardless of who has them, whereas the Kantian's applies to the judgments of rational agents (for example in Kant's kingdom of Ends or John Rawls's original position). This universalising step, which Singer traces from Immanuel Kant to Hare,is crucial and sets him apart from those moral theorists, from Thomas Hobbes to David Gauthier, who tie morality to prudence. According to Singer, universalisation leads directly to utilitarianism, on the strength of the thought that one's own interests cannot count for more than the interests of others.Animal Liberation, pp. 211, 256 Singer regards Kantian universalisation as unjust to animals. As for the Hobbesians, Singer attempts a response in the final chapter of Practical Ethics, arguing that self-interested reasons support adoption of the moral point of view, such as "the paradox of hedonism", which counsels that happiness is best found by not looking for it, and the need most people feel to relate to something larger than their own concerns. Singer identifies as a sentientist; sentientism is an ethical position that grants moral consideration to all sentient beings.
Effective altruism and world poverty
Singer has influenced effective altruism. In his essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972), he posits that citizens of rich nations have a moral imperative to give at least some of their disposable income to charities that help the global poor. He uses the drowning child analogy, which states that most people would rescue a drowning child from a pond, even if it meant that their expensive clothes were ruined. He argues that we can save lives by donating to effective charities, and that a significant portion of the money spent on unnecessary possessions should instead be donated to charities helping the world's poor. He argues that people should try not only to reduce suffering but to reduce it in the most effective manner possible.
He writes about how the effective altruism movement is doing these things effectively in The Most Good You Can Do (2015). He is a board member of Animal Charity Evaluators, a charity evaluator used by many members of the effective altruism community which recommends the most cost-effective animal advocacy charities and interventions.
His own organisation, The Life You Can Save (TLYCS), recommends a selection of charities deemed by charity evaluators such as GiveWell to be the most effective when it comes to helping those in extreme poverty. TLYCS was founded after Singer released his eponymous 2009 book, in which he argues more generally in favour of giving to charities that help to end global poverty. Since November 2009, Singer is a member of Giving What We Can, an international organisation whose members pledge to give at least 10% of their income to effective charities. He gave a TED talk, "The Why and How of Effective Altruism".
Animal liberation and speciesism
Animal Liberation (1975) has been cited as a formative influence on leaders of the modern animal rights movement. The book's central argument is an expansion of the utilitarian concept that "the greatest good of the greatest number" is the only measure of good or ethical behaviour, and Singer believes that there is no reason not to apply this principle to other animals, arguing that the boundary between human and "animal" is completely arbitrary. For example, there are far more differences between a great ape and an oyster than between a human and a great ape, and yet the former two are lumped together as "animals", whereas we are considered "human" in a way that supposedly differentiates us from all other "animals". He popularised the term "speciesism", which had been coined by English writer Richard D. Ryder to describe the practice of privileging humans over other animals, and argues in favour of the equal consideration of interests of all sentient beings.