Peter Singer

Key ideas

In 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality' (1972), Singer asked whether you would wade into a pond to save a drowning child, even if it ruined your clothes. Almost everyone says yes. But then, he argued, distance and numbers make no moral difference, and we ought to give far more to prevent suffering elsewhere. The drowning child argument is a major source of effective altruism.

In Animal Liberation he argued that the capacity to suffer, not intelligence or species, is what gives a being moral status, and that discounting animal suffering is speciesism, comparable to racism or sexism. The book helped found the modern animal movement and is central to animal ethics.

His views on other topics, especially on end-of-life questions, have been fiercely contested, and he has been the target of protests. Both admirers and critics agree that he follows his arguments wherever they lead.

Life, briefly

Singer was born in Melbourne to parents who had fled Vienna in 1938. He studied at Melbourne and Oxford, taught at Monash University, and joined Princeton in 1999.

Major works

• Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972)
• Animal Liberation (1975)
• Practical Ethics (1979)
• The Life You Can Save (2009)
• The Most Good You Can Do (2015)

Schools of thought

Utilitarianism

Further reading

• WikipediaPeter Singer