Peter Singer

Peter Singer (born July 6, 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, long the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, whose utilitarian arguments for aiding the global poor and for the moral status of animals made him one of the most widely read and most protested philosophers of the late twentieth century. His 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" and its drowning-child thought experiment are routinely cited as the founding text of the Effective Altruism movement, and he keynoted the movement's 2013 summit.¹²

Education and Career

Singer was born in Melbourne to Austrian Jewish refugees who had fled Vienna after the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria; three of his grandparents died in the Holocaust, and his maternal grandfather, the classicist David Ernst Oppenheim, was murdered at Theresienstadt. He took a BA in 1967 and an MA in 1969 at the University of Melbourne, the latter on the thesis "Why Should I Be Moral?", then a BPhil at Oxford in 1971 under R. M. Hare. He held a Radcliffe lectureship at University College, Oxford, and a visiting post at New York University before returning to Australia.³

At Monash University he twice chaired the philosophy department and founded the Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1999 he was appointed the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton's University Center for Human Values, a post he held until his final lecture in 2023. His applied work in Practical Ethics (1979) extended utilitarian reasoning to abortion, euthanasia, severe infant disability, and the treatment of animals, and his stated positions on infanticide in cases of severe disability drew organized protests in Germany and Switzerland in 1989 and 1990 and a public campaign against his Princeton appointment, with the publisher Steve Forbes withdrawing donations to the university.³⁴

Famine, Affluence, and Morality

"Famine, Affluence, and Morality," published in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1972, argued from a single premise: "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." Singer illustrated it with a child drowning in a shallow pond: a passerby who could wade in and save the child at the cost only of muddy clothes is plainly obligated to do so, and Singer held that the geographic distance of a dying child abroad makes no moral difference to the same obligation. The essay concluded that affluent people are bound to give away income up to the point of marginal sacrifice toward famine relief.¹⁵

The essay became one of the most reprinted pieces in modern moral philosophy and supplied effective altruism its motivating intuition; movement organizers and William MacAskill have described the drowning-child argument as the writing that did more than any other to launch the movement. Singer joined Giving What We Can in November 2009, pledging at least ten percent of his income, the year Toby Ord and MacAskill founded the society.²⁵

Animal Liberation and the Expanding Circle

Animal Liberation, published in 1975, argued that the interests of all sentient beings deserve equal consideration and that disregarding animal suffering on the basis of species, which Singer following Richard Ryder called "speciesism," is a prejudice structurally like racism. The book became the foundational text of the modern animal-rights movement and the intellectual basis for the farmed-animal-welfare cause that effective altruism later adopted as a priority; Singer has served on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators.³

The Expanding Circle, published in 1981, drew on sociobiology to argue that the scope of beings a person treats as morally considerable has widened over history from kin to tribe to nation to all humanity and, Singer urged, should widen further to all sentient life, with impartial reason as the engine of that expansion. Singer's normative position was for decades a preference utilitarianism, on which an act's rightness depends on how far it satisfies the preferences of those affected; in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), written with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, he returned to a hedonistic utilitarianism descended from Henry Sidgwick.⁶

The Life You Can Save and Effective Altruism

Singer's 2009 book The Life You Can Save restated the case for effective giving against global poverty and gave its name to a charity Singer co-founded in 2013 with the psychologist Charlie Bresler, which evaluates and recommends high-impact poverty charities. His 2013 TED talk "The why and how of effective altruism" and his 2015 book The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically placed him at the public head of the movement.⁷⁸

In 2013 Singer delivered a keynote at the Effective Altruism Summit, a week-long gathering in the San Francisco Bay Area that brought together the Oxford philosophers, the charity evaluator GiveWell, and the Rationalist Community. The 2013 summit was the same event that Peter Thiel keynoted, and the year before Sam Bankman-Fried adopted the earning-to-give strategy MacAskill had presented to him. Singer was awarded the inaugural Berggruen Prize in 2021, donating the one-million-dollar award.²⁸