Peter singer philosopher biography paper
Peter Singer
Australian moral philosopher (born 1946)
For other people named Peter Singer, see Peter Singer (disambiguation).
Peter Albert David SingerAC FAHA (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher who is Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer's work specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He wrote the book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues for vegetarianism, and the essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which argues the moral imperative of donating to help the poor around the world. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian. He revealed in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian.
On two occasions, Singer served as chair of the philosophy department at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996, he stood unsuccessfully as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004, Singer was recognised as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. In 2005, The Sydney Morning Herald placed him among Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals. Singer is a cofounder of Animals Australia and the founder of the non-profit organization The Life You Can Save.
Early life and education
Peter Singer was born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, on 6 July 1946. His parents were Austrian Jews who immigrated to Australia from Vienna after Austria's annexation (Anschluss) by Nazi Germany in 1938, and settled in Melbourne. His paternal grandparents were taken by the Nazis to Łódź, and were most likely murdered, since they were never heard from again; his maternal grandfather David Ernst Oppenheim (1881–1943), an educator and psychologist who collaborated with Sigmund Fr Singer was born in 1946, Melbourne, Australia, to an Austrian Jewish family that emigrated from Austria to escape persecution by the Nazis. He studied law, history and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and majored in philosophy. He later did a B.Phil at Oxford University, where he associated with a vegetarian student group and became a vegetarian himself. Around this time he wrote Animal Liberation (1975), which has been called the “bible” of the animal liberation movement. In 1999, Singer was appointed as Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. In 2004, he was recognized as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. He founded the non-profit organisation The Life You Can Save, named after his book of the same name, and is often regarded as a core intellectual inspiration to the effective altruism movement. Singer is the most famous and influential contemporary utilitarian philosopher. Singer is best known for his views on animal ethics. In his book Animal Liberation he popularized the term speciesism, which he defines as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species”. He argues for the equal consideration of human and non-human animal interests because animals have the capacity for suffering and enjoyment. He rejects the idea that non-human animals’ interests should be considered less based on their intelligence with the argument from marginal cases: if we should consider the interests of infants, the cognitively disabled and the senile equally to the interests of the average human, we should also consider the interests of non-human animals equally, for there is no relevant property these humans have that non-human animals lack. Consequently, Singer has long advocated for reducing the suffering of farmed animals. Singer has also campaigned against global Journalists have bestowed on me the tag of “world’s most influential living philosopher.” They are probably thinking of my work on the ethics of our treatment of animals, often credited with starting the modern animal rights movement, and with the influence that my writing has had on the development of effective altruism. I am also known for my controversial critique of the sanctity of life ethics in bioethics. In 2021 I was delighted to receive the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. The citation referred to my “widely influential and intellectually rigorous work in reinvigorating utilitarianism as part of academic philosophy and as a force for change in the world.” The prize comes with $1 million which, in accordance with views I have been defending for many years, I am donating to the most effective organizations working to assist people in extreme poverty and to reduce the suffering of animals in factory farms. I am the founder of The Life You Can Save, an organization based on my book of the same name. It aims to spread my ideas about why we should be doing much more to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty, and how we can best do this. In 2013, I gave a TED talk on this topic. My writings in this area include: the 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” in which I argue for donating to help the global poor; and two books that make the case for effective giving, The Life You Can Save (2009) and The Most Good You Can Do (2015). I have written, co-authored, edited or co-edited more than 50 books, including Practical Ethics, The Expanding Circle, Rethinking Life and Death, One World, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason) and The Point of View of the Universe (with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek.) My writings have appeared in more than 25 languages. I was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of M Peter Albert David Singer (b. 1946) is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, where he teaches an intensive seminar with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radekil. The renown Australian-born Jewish philosopher has challenged traditional notions of applied ethics for over thirty years and is world famous for giving the impetus to the animal rights movement. Today, he is the chair of ethics at Princeton University. Singer has also been the chair of philosophy twice at Monash University (Australia), where he also founded the Centre for Human Bioethics. Peter Singer is a rationalist philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition of utilitarianism. He teaches “practical ethics,” which he defines as the application of morality to practical problems based on philosophical thinking rather than religious beliefs. In 2009, Singer would make it to Timemagazine’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” Peter Singer’s parents were Viennese Jews who had escaped the annexation of Austria and had fled to Australia in 1938. His paternal grandparents were deported to Lodz, a concentration camp in Poland—Singer may never know what really happened to them. His maternal grandfather, however, died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Singer’s father was a tea and coffee importer, while his mother was a medical doctor. For a time, Peter Singer attended Scotch College in Melbourne, Australia. After leaving school, Singer studied law, history, and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, where he graduated in 1967 with a Bachelor or Arts. In 1969, he subsequently received an MA for his thesis “Why should I be moral?” After that, Singer was rewarded for his promising work with an offer to enter the University of Oxford, which he accepted. This lead to his earning a BPhil—which is, in spite of its name, a graduate degree in philosophy—in 1971. His dissertation would be on civil disobedience, s Effective altruism measures the number of lives saved per dollar.
Peter Singer