July 6: Peter Singer

Philosopher and animal rights proponent Peter Singer was born on this date in 1946 in Melbourne, Australia. His parents were Viennese Jews who fled the Nazis in 1938; his three grandparents were killed during the Holocaust. Singer spent most of his academic career in Melbourne until joining the faculty of Princeton University in 1999. In his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, and his 1979 work, Practical Ethics, he argued that the capacity of living beings for “suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness” should qualify them for ethical consideration (on the basis of “the greatest good for the greatest number”), regardless of whether they are human. In some instances, he argued, a highly sentient animal may deserve greater ethical consideration than a severely handicapped human being (a stance that has infuriated some disability rights activists). In his well-known essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Singer argued that living in abundance while others live in dire poverty is morally indefensible, and that we are all obliged to forgo small pleasures in order to relieve enormous pain. Still, he says, while “capitalism is very far from a perfect system . . . we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy.” Singer donates 25 percent of his salary to Oxfam and UNICEF and is a vegetarian. In 2009 he published The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty.

“The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.” —Peter Singer