Philosophers / Contemporary Western
Peter Singer
AU 1946-07-06
Australian-born ethicist (1946- ), bioethics professor at Princeton. Animal Liberation (1975) launched the modern animal rights movement; his poverty work grounds the effective altruism movement.
What You Can Learn
Three Singerian moves carry into modern decision-making. First, effective altruism: in CSR, ESG and philanthropy, replace warm-feeling giving with cold calculation of how many lives a marginal dollar saves. Second, the drowning-child thought experiment turns physical distance into a moral non-issue, sharpening responsibility along global supply chains. Third, his methodological clarity is a teachable model for business ethics: apply one principle consistently and follow conclusions where they lead.
Words That Resonate
All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.
If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.
The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.
The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all.
Life & Legacy
Peter Singer is the most consequential applied ethicist of the last fifty years. Born in Melbourne in 1946 to Jewish refugees from Vienna, he studied law, history and philosophy at Melbourne and took his B.Phil. and D.Phil. at Oxford under R.M. Hare. From 1999 he has been the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton's University Center for Human Values, while continuing to lecture in Australia.
Animal Liberation (1975) gave the animal rights movement its philosophical floor. Borrowing "speciesism" from Richard Ryder, Singer argued that equal consideration of interests must extend to all sentient beings. The book attacks factory farming, asks readers to stop subsidising the system, and made vegetarianism a coherent ethical option for a wide public. Singer has been vegetarian for thirty years.
His second theme is global poverty. "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972) and The Life You Can Save (2009) argue that affluent people who fail to give away a substantial share of their income are not merely unkind but morally in the wrong. His drowning-child thought experiment — anyone would ruin new shoes to pull a child from a pond, so why not give modest sums to save lives at distance? — became standard ethics-class material and the philosophical seed of the effective altruism movement. Singer donates over 25% of his income to charities such as Oxfam and UNICEF.
His third domain is bioethics. Practical Ethics (1979) defends voluntary euthanasia and considers cases of severe newborn disability where infanticide may be permissible. The argument denies that species membership is itself sufficient for full moral status, a thesis attacked by religious and disability-rights communities.
The through-line is methodological: Singer applies one principle — equal consideration of interests, in preference-utilitarian form — across animals, poverty and bioethics in plain prose. The New Yorker has called him "the most influential living philosopher."
Expert Perspective
Within contemporary applied ethics Singer is the central figure who recast classical utilitarianism as a preference-utilitarian framework, then applied it consistently to animals, poverty and bioethics. His work is contested but it largely defines the academic shape of applied ethics today.
