Peter Singer
b. 1946, Melbourne and Princeton
Utilitarianism; applied ethics
Distance does not reduce what you owe someone.
“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 life
Born in Melbourne to Austrian Jewish refugees who had fled Vienna in 1938; three of his four grandparents died in the camps. He studied at Melbourne and then Oxford, where he encountered the moral philosophy of R. M. Hare and, over a lunch with a fellow graduate student, the argument that animals' interests could not be discounted merely for being animals'. He became vegetarian shortly afterwards.
Animal Liberation appeared in 1975 and became the founding text of the modern animal movement. Famine, Affluence, and Morality had appeared three years earlier and became one of the most reprinted papers in moral philosophy. He has taught at Monash and, since 1999, at Princeton, where his appointment drew organised protest over his writing on disability and infanticide.
He gives a large and publicly stated share of his income away, and co-founded The Life You Can Save. He is among the very few academic philosophers whose arguments have measurably changed what large numbers of people do.
What shaped the ideas
Applied ethics barely existed as a field in 1970. Moral philosophy had spent decades on the meaning of moral terms, and questions like famine relief or the treatment of animals were regarded as not properly philosophical.
Singer's work, alongside a handful of others, reopened them by insisting that ordinary utilitarian premises, taken seriously and applied consistently, generate conclusions that ordinary people find intolerable, and that the discomfort is a fact about us rather than a refutation. The Bengal famine of 1971 supplied the immediate occasion for the argument that made his name.
Core arguments
- 01
The drowning child
Affluent people are obliged to give far more than they do.
Everyone agrees you must save a drowning child even at the cost of ruining your clothes. If you can prevent something very bad at little cost you ought to; neither physical distance nor the fact that others could also act is morally relevant; therefore the obligation extends to preventable deaths far away. Every premise is one nearly everyone already accepts.
- 02
Equal consideration of interests
Like interests count equally, whoever has them.
This is not a claim that everyone should be treated identically (a pig has no interest in voting) but that an interest of a given strength gets the same weight regardless of whose it is. Race and sex were excluded from moral relevance on exactly this principle, and species, he argues, cannot be defended where those could not.
- 03
Speciesism
Discounting an interest because of the species of its bearer is unjustified bias.
The relevant capacity is sentience: if a being can suffer, there is no defensible ground for giving its suffering less weight than equivalent human suffering. The criteria usually proposed (reason, language, moral agency) either exclude some humans or include some animals, and no principled line has been produced.
- 04
Effective altruism
Where to give matters as much as whether to give.
If the obligation is to prevent bad things, then interventions differ enormously in how much bad they prevent per pound, and the difference can be several orders of magnitude. Choosing a cause by personal resonance rather than by evidence therefore costs lives that could have been saved with the same money.
Commonly got wrong
- The drowning child argument does not depend on utilitarianism. Its first premise is accepted by nearly every moral theory, which is what makes it hard to escape.
- 'Speciesism' is not a claim that humans and animals are equal in worth. It is a claim about equal consideration of like interests.
- He does not say charity is nice. He says the category of optional charity is a mistake produced by distance and invisibility.
- His positions on disability are contested on their merits and are frequently misreported; reading the argument before the summary is worth the effort in both directions.
Works
'Famine, Affluence, and Morality' 1972
Nine pages, written during the Bengal famine, and the origin of the drowning child.
Animal Liberation 1975
The founding text of the modern animal movement.
Practical Ethics 1979
The systematic statement, and the source of most of the controversy.
The Life You Can Save 2009
The argument made practical, with a recommended giving schedule.
'Famine, Affluence, and Morality'. Nine pages. Then try to find the premise you want to reject.
Why they still get taught
A movement that changed how millions of people eat, a philanthropic methodology that has moved billions of dollars, and the standing demonstration that a nine-page paper with three premises can be more consequential than a system.
Chapters
- The Drowning Child · Ethics at the Edges