Peter Singer

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher who holds the title of Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Fellow philosopher Helga Kuhse judged him almost certainly the best-known and most widely read of all contemporary philosophers. The writer Michael Specter placed him among the most influential. Yet his books have also drawn protests, cancelled events and sustained anger from religious critics and disability rights advocates. He gave his last lecture at Princeton in 2023 and has since retired. Singer works in applied ethics, and he approaches it from a secular, utilitarian direction. He takes one simple-sounding principle and follows it wherever it leads, even when the destination is uncomfortable for his listeners. How did a single lunch in Oxford change the course of his life? Why does he ask comfortable people to give away part of their income? And why did crowds in several countries try to stop him from speaking?

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• 2. Vienna to Balliol

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  Singer's parents left Vienna for Melbourne after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Peter Albert David Singer was born in Melbourne on the 6th of July 1946. His father's parents were taken by the Nazis to Łódź. They were never heard from again and were most likely murdered. His mother's father, the educator and psychologist David Ernst Oppenheim, was born in 1881 and was murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. Oppenheim had belonged to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and wrote a joint article with Sigmund Freud. He later joined the Adlerian Society for Individual Psychology. Singer eventually wrote a biography of him.

  The household in Melbourne was prosperous and non-religious. His father ran a successful business importing tea and coffee. The family rarely marked Jewish holidays, and Singer declined to have a Bar Mitzvah. He attended Preshil and then Scotch College. At the University of Melbourne he lived at Ormond College and studied law, history and philosophy. He took a bachelor's degree in 1967. Philosophy won out after conversations with his sister's boyfriend of the time. In 1969 he completed a master's thesis titled Why Should I Be Moral?

  A scholarship then took him to the University of Oxford. There he earned a Bachelor of Philosophy in 1971 with a thesis on civil disobedience, supervised by R. M. Hare. It appeared as a book in 1973. Singer names Hare, the Australian philosopher H. J. McCloskey and the British philosopher J. L. H. Thomas as his most important mentors. Thomas taught him how to read and understand Hegel. Singer remembers those classes as remarkable, because students had to probe the Phenomenology sentence by sentence until it gave up its meaning.

  The decisive experience of his formative years, by his own account, came at Balliol College. After class he lunched with a fellow graduate student, Richard Keshen, who later became a professor at Cape Breton University. Keshen was told the spaghetti sauce contained meat, so he chose a salad. Singer ate the spaghetti, then asked why his friend had refused it. Keshen gave an ethical answer. Singer later said he had never met a vegetarian whose reasoning was so straightforward that he could understand and relate to it.

  Keshen introduced him to other vegetarian friends. Singer found one book on the subject, Animal Machines by Ruth Harrison. Within a week or two he told his wife that he did not think they could justify eating meat. Singer says he has been a vegetarian since 1971.

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• 3. Equal Interests

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  In 1979 Singer published Practical Ethics, a book that runs one framework across a long list of contemporary quarrels. Its subjects include equality, global poverty, euthanasia, ethical vegetarianism, environmental ethics, civil disobedience and violence. The framework at that stage was preference utilitarianism. Its core is the principle of equal consideration of interests, which asks for an impartial, universal viewpoint.

  Equal consideration does not mean identical treatment. Singer points out that a starving person's interest in food outweighs the interest of someone who is only slightly hungry. Different interests call for different handling. The test for having interests worth weighing is sentience, meaning the capacity for suffering or happiness. Sentient beings also have interests in developing their abilities, meeting basic needs, enjoying warm relationships and pursuing their own projects without interference. Singer identifies as a sentientist, someone who grants moral consideration to every sentient being.

  The step that carries the argument is universalising. Singer traces it from Immanuel Kant to Hare. In his version it applies to interests, whoever holds them, whereas the Kantian version applies to the judgments of rational agents. He regards the Kantian version as unjust to animals. It also separates him from thinkers, from Thomas Hobbes to David Gauthier, who tie morality to prudence. For Singer, universalising leads straight to utilitarianism, since your own interests cannot count for more than anyone else's.

  The Hobbesians get an answer in the final chapter of Practical Ethics. Singer argues that self-interest itself gives reasons to take the moral point of view. One is the paradox of hedonism, which holds that happiness is best found by not looking for it. Another is the need most people feel to belong to something larger than their own concerns. He still concedes, in the second edition, that the question of why we should act morally has no answer giving everyone overwhelming reasons.

  For years Singer denied that objective moral values exist, because reason could favour both egoism and equal consideration. That changed with The Point of View of the Universe, written in 2014 with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. The book defends the 19th-century utilitarian Henry Sidgwick, who held that objective morality can be derived from axioms knowable by reason. It also endorses Derek Parfit's view that there are object-given reasons for action. Its evolutionary argument runs as follows. Egoism is exactly what natural selection would produce, so it tells us little about what is correct. Impartiality runs against that grain, which makes it more likely to be right.

  The same book carried a quieter confession. After most of his career as a preference utilitarian, Singer revealed that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian.

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• 4. Animal Liberation

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  A great ape, Singer argues, differs far more from an oyster than a human differs from a great ape. Yet the first two are both filed under "animals" while humans get a category of their own. That observation anchors Animal Liberation, published in 1975. The book has been cited as a formative influence on leaders of the modern animal liberation movement. Its argument extends the utilitarian standard of the greatest good of the greatest number to other animals, and it calls the boundary between human and animal completely arbitrary.

  Singer popularised the word "speciesism", which the English writer Richard D. Ryder had coined for privileging humans over other animals. The book argues for vegetarianism and against most animal experimentation. Singer's own diet has shifted over time. In a 2006 interview he said he had gradually become increasingly vegan, adding "I am largely vegan but I'm a flexible vegan." In 2022 he said he is not fully vegan because he occasionally eats oysters, mussels and clams, which lack a central nervous system.

  His objection is to suffering rather than to death. He holds that meat-eating can be ethically permissible if farms give animals good lives and kill them humanely, preferably without transport or disturbance. In his words, "In Animal Liberation, I don't really say that it's the killing that makes meat-eating wrong, it's the suffering." In an article for Chinadialogue he called Western-style meat production cruel, unhealthy and damaging to the ecosystem. Animals in factory farms, he noted, eat food grown specially for them and burn most of its energy just to breathe and stay warm.

  In 2010 a Guardian article of his, titled "Fish: the forgotten victims on our plate", turned to fish. He cited Alison Mood, whose report on fishcount.org.uk appeared a month earlier. Singer called it perhaps the first systematic estimate of the annual global catch of wild fish. She put the figure around one trillion, and possibly as high as 2.7 trillion.

  Animal experimentation is a harder case. Unlike groups such as PETA, Singer accepts testing when the medical benefit is clear. In November 2006 he appeared on the BBC programme Monkeys, Rats and Me: Animal Testing. He said Tipu Aziz's monkey experiments on Parkinson's disease could be justified. In recent years he has spoken far less on the subject than on diet.

  He has defended some actions of the Animal Liberation Front, including the taking of footage from Thomas Gennarelli's laboratory in May 1984, shown in the documentary Unnecessary Fuss. He condemns the use of explosives. He sees freeing captive animals as largely futile, because they are easily replaced. He often writes op-eds with the animal rights advocate Karen Dawn.

  The philosopher Roger Scruton attacked the whole approach. He alleged that Singer's works contain "little or no philosophical argument" and rest on a vacuous utilitarianism that ignores the real distinction between persons and animals. Singer later appeared in the 2017 documentary Empathy, directed by Ed Antoja, which won the Public Choice Award at the Greenpeace Film Festival.

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• 5. The Drowning Child

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  A child is drowning in a shallow pond, and rescuing her will ruin your expensive clothes. Most people say they would wade in without hesitation. This is the drowning child analogy, and Singer built much of his public influence on it. It comes from his 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality". There he argues that citizens of rich nations are morally obligated to give at least some of their disposable income to charities that help the global poor. If we would pay the price of ruined clothes for one child, he says, we should spend on lives we can save elsewhere. A significant part of what is spent on unnecessary possessions should go to charity instead.

  In 2009 he returned to the argument at book length in The Life You Can Save. The book gave its name to a non-profit organisation that Singer founded. It recommends charities rated as most effective at helping people in extreme poverty by evaluators such as GiveWell. In November 2009 he also joined Giving What We Can, whose members pledge at least 10% of their income to effective charities.

  These ideas helped feed the rise of effective altruism. The goal, as Singer frames it, is not only to reduce suffering but to reduce it as effectively as possible. His 2015 book The Most Good You Can Do describes how that movement pursues the aim. He serves on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators, which recommends the most cost-effective animal advocacy charities.

  In 2021 Singer won the US$1-million Berggruen Prize and decided to give it away. Half went to The Life You Can Save. His reason was that, over the previous three years, each dollar it spent generated an average of $17 in donations for its recommended nonprofits. He added that he has never taken money from the organisation for personal use. More than a third of the prize was earmarked for groups combating intensive animal farming that Animal Charity Evaluators recommends.

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• 6. Life and Death

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  Singer links the right to life to a being's capacity to hold preferences. By that test, he argues, newborns lack rationality, autonomy and self-consciousness. He writes that "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living." He favours voluntary euthanasia and some forms of non-voluntary euthanasia, including infanticide in certain instances. He opposes involuntary euthanasia.

  In Rethinking Life and Death, Singer lays out the classic argument against abortion in three steps. It is wrong to kill an innocent human being, a fetus is one, and so killing a fetus is wrong. He grants the logic is valid. Most abortion-rights supporters deny the second step, but he rejects that route, because human development is gradual. He suggests that a human life may begin at conception, or about 14 days later, when an embryo can no longer divide into twins. His challenge is to the first step. He argues that a being's being human and alive does not alone make killing it wrong. Since the fetus lacks the capacity to feel pain or pleasure until well into pregnancy, he concludes it has no interests to outweigh the woman's.

  Critics came from several directions. Bioethicists in disability studies argued that his reasoning rests on ableist ideas of disability. Religious critics said he undermines the sanctity of life. Singer agrees with the description and thinks the notion should be discarded as outdated and unscientific. He replies that people judge him by secondhand summaries and short quotations taken out of context. His aim, he says, is to raise the status of animals rather than lower that of humans.

  Some opponents took action. The publisher Steve Forbes stopped his donations to Princeton University in 1999 over Singer's appointment. The Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote to the organisers of a Swedish book fair that a professor who justifies killing handicapped newborns was unacceptable as a guest. The psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple called Singerian moral universalism "preposterous" in 2010. In 2002 the disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson debated him. She wrote about the encounters in "Unspeakable Conversations", published in the New York Times Magazine in 2003. In 2015 Singer debated Archbishop Anthony Fisher at Sydney Town Hall over legalising euthanasia, and he rejected the slippery slope objection.

  In 2017 Singer and Jeff McMahan wrote an op-ed defending Anna Stubblefield, who had been convicted of aggravated sexual assault against D.J., a man with severe physical disability. They argued the judge ignored evidence that D.J. could communicate indirectly. Nathan J. Robinson, founder of Current Affairs, objected strongly to their suggestion that the experience was probably pleasurable for him. He called the act a rape.

  The questions are not only abstract for Singer. His mother had Alzheimer's disease. In an interview with Ronald Bailey, published in December 2000, he said his sister shares the decisions about their mother. If he alone were responsible, he said, his mother might not continue to live.

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• 7. Singer Raus

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  In 1989 and 1990, protests against Singer spread across Germany. At the University of Duisburg, Hartmut Kliemt taught an ethics course built around Practical Ethics. Singer says protesters repeatedly disrupted it, objecting that one of the book's ten chapters advocates active euthanasia for severely disabled newborns. The course was shut down. At a lecture in Saarbrücken, a group that included disability rights advocates interrupted him. One protester said that entering serious discussion would be a tactical error.

  That same year Singer was invited to Marburg for a European symposium titled Bioengineering, Ethics and Mental Disability. Leading intellectuals and organisations in the German media attacked the invitation fiercely. An article in Der Spiegel compared his positions to Nazism. The symposium was cancelled and his invitation withdrawn.

  At the Zoological Institute of the University of Zurich, two groups of protesters interrupted a lecture. The first, disabled people, staged a brief protest at the start. When Singer tried to address their concerns, a second group stood and chanted Singer raus, meaning "Singer out". A protester jumped on stage and grabbed his glasses, and the host ended the lecture. Singer says that his views are "not threatening to anyone, even minimally". He thinks some groups play on the fear of repeating the Holocaust among people who hear only alarming keywords.

  In 1991 Singer was due to speak with R. M. Hare and Georg Meggle at the 15th International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria. Singer says threats were made to Adolf Hübner, then president of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, that the conference would be disrupted. Hübner proposed withdrawing the invitations to Singer and several other speakers. The Society decided to cancel the symposium instead.

  Singer drew an odd lesson from the episode in an article first published in The New York Review of Books. Instead of a few hundred people hearing him in Marburg and Dortmund, several million read or watched coverage. He still says the aftermath left a difficult intellectual climate. German professors could not teach applied ethics courses, and campaigns demanded the resignation of professors who had invited him.

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• 8. Public Life

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  As a student in Melbourne, Singer served as president of the Melbourne University Campaign Against Conscription and campaigned against the Vietnam War. He also spoke publicly for legalising abortion in Australia. In 1974 he joined the Australian Labor Party, then resigned, disillusioned with the centrist leadership of Bob Hawke. In 1992 he became a founding member of the Victorian Greens. He won 28% of the vote in the 1994 Kooyong by-election and 3% when he ran for the Senate in 1996. Before that election he co-authored The Greens with Bob Brown.

  In A Darwinian Left, Singer asks the political left to absorb the lessons of evolutionary biology. Humans are naturally self-interested, he writes, but that is no proof that selfishness is right. Game theory and psychology experiments suggest that self-interested people will make short-term sacrifices when society sets the right conditions. He also stresses the human capacity for cooperation, which evolution selected for as well.

  In a 2010 interview with the New Left Project, he described himself as not anti-capitalist. He said he would happily take that label if a better system ever turned up than a regulated capitalist economy with a welfare and health care safety net. His book Marx is sympathetic to Marx's critique of capitalism as wasteful and irrational. It is skeptical, though, that a better system is easy to build. He opposes the death penalty, and in 2021 he called the war on drugs expensive, ineffective and extremely harmful.

  His causes extend to population and ageing. In a 2018 lecture titled Too Many People? Ethics and Population in the 21st Century, he noted that none of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or their 169 targets mention global population. On ageing, he points out that in developed countries it is the ultimate cause of 90 per cent of deaths. He backs medical intervention against it, while worrying that the rich might outlive the poor. In 2012 his department sponsored a Princeton seminar on eliminating aging.

  Several honours followed. He was inducted into the United States Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2000. In June 2012 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia. In 2016 Philosophy Now gave him its Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity, and in 2022 he received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award. In 2018 he co-founded the open-access Journal of Controversial Ideas with Francesca Minerva and Jeff McMahan.

  At home, Singer has been married since 1968 to Renata Singer, born in 1947 in Wałbrzych, Poland. She is a novelist and author who has collaborated with him on publications. They have three children: Ruth, a textile artist, Marion, a lawyer, and Esther, a linguist and teacher. Until 2021, Renata was president of the Kadimah Jewish Cultural Centre and National Library in Melbourne.

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