Peter Singer

Peter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher born in Melbourne in 1946. Educated at the University of Melbourne and Oxford, he taught in Australia, Britain and the United States. He spent 25 years as Princeton University’s Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics before retiring from Princeton in 2024.

Singer works chiefly in practical ethics, testing moral principles against choices involving animals, poverty, charitable giving and medicine. His prose is direct and argumentative, often built around memorable cases. In his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” for example, a child drowning in a shallow pond becomes the starting point for an argument about helping distant strangers.

Animal Liberation brought his case against disregarding animal suffering to a wide public. Other major works include Practical Ethics, The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do. Singer was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2012 and received the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture in 2021, recognizing the reach of his utilitarian thought and public philosophy.

Start with The Expanding Circle. First published in 1981 and later reissued with a new preface and afterword, it asks how altruism could emerge through evolution yet grow beyond kin and community. Singer’s answer gives reason a central role in widening moral concern. It is a compact introduction to the structure of his thinking and the ambitions behind his wider work.