
Big Thinker: Peter Singer
ArticleBig Thinkers + Explainers
BY The Ethics Centre 6 SEP 2019
Peter Singer (1946—present), one of world’s most influential living philosophers, is best known for applying rigorous logic to a range of practical issues from animal rights, giving to charity to the ethics of abortion and infanticide.
Singer was born in Melbourne in 1946 to Austrian Jewish Holocaust survivors. As a teen he declared his atheism and refused to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah. After studying law, history and philosophy at Melbourne University, he won a scholarship to Oxford University, writing his thesis on civil disobedience. In 1996 he ran unsuccessfully for the Greens in the Victorian State Parliament, and he has held posts at Melbourne, Monash, New York, London and Princeton Universities. His impact on public debate and academic philosophy cannot be overstated.
A key aspect of Singer’s contributions is the idea of ‘equal consideration of interests’. This informs both his views towards animals and charity. It means that we should consider the interests of any sentient beings who have the capacity to suffer and feel pleasure and pain.
Singer is a consequentialist, which means he defines ethical actions as ones that maximise overall pleasure and reduce overall pain. Part of what makes him such a challenging and influential thinker is his application of utilitarianism to real-world problems to offer counter-intuitive yet compelling solutions.’
Are you speciesist?
While at Oxford, Singer recalls a conversation with a friend over lunch that was the “most formative experience of [his] life”. Singer had the meat spaghetti, whereas his friend opted for the salad. His friend was the “first ethical vegetarian” he’d met. Two weeks later, Singer became a vegetarian and several years later published his seminal work Animal Liberation (1975).
Singer’s argument for not eating meat is more-or-less the same as another utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham wrote that “the question is not can they reason or can they talk, but can they suffer?” Similarly, Singer argues that animals have the capacity to suffer. Just as we rightly condemn torture, we should also condemn practices like factory farming that inflict unjustifiable pain on non-human animals. He coined the term ‘speciesism’ to describe the privileging of humans over other animals.
Giving to charity
In Singer’s essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” (1972), he argues that people in rich countries have a moral obligation to give to charities that help people in poverty overseas. He uses an analogy of a drowning child: if we were walking past a shallow pond and saw a child drowning, we would wade in and save the child, even if this meant wrecking our favourite and most expensive pair of shoes. Likewise, because we know there are children dying overseas from preventable poverty-related diseases, we should be giving at least some of our income to charities that fight this.
Opponents to Singer argue that his view about giving to charity is psychologically untenable, and that there are differences between giving to charity and saving a drowning child. For example, the physical act of pulling a child out from water is more morally compelling than sending a cheque overseas. Other arguments include: we don’t know the child will definitely be saved when we send the cheque, fighting poverty requires a collective global effort not just an individual donation, and charities are ineffective and have high overhead costs.
Singer concedes that there may be psychological reasons why people would save the drowning child yet don’t give much to charity, but he says even if it seems strange, rationally there are no relevant moral differences between the cases.
Responding to the criticism that charities may not be effective has led Singer to be a proponent of ‘effective altruism’. In his book The Most Good You Can Do (2015) he describes how a number of charity evaluators can recommend the most cost-effective way to do good. Singer recommends giving on a progressive scale, depending on one’s income.
Instead of pursuing careers in academia, some of Singer’s brightest past students have decided to work for Wall Street to make as much money as possible to then give this away to effective charities.
Controversy around infanticide
Singer has faced sustained criticism and protest throughout his career for his views on the sanctity of life and disability – especially in Germany, where in the 90’s, his views were compared to Nazism and university courses that set his books were boycotted. While he has always been a staunch supporter of abortion on the grounds that a foetus lacks self-consciousness and the criteria of personhood, he argues there is no moral difference between abortion in the womb and killing a newborn. Furthermore, because a newborn cannot yet be classified as a person, if its parents do not want it to survive, or if it has an extreme disability meaning that keeping it alive would be very costly, there is potential justification in killing it.
Religious sanctity-of-life critics argue that Singer’s ethics ignore the fundamental sanctity of human life. Disability rights advocates argue that Singer’s views are ableist, explaining that the quality of life of a disabled person is less than that of a non-disabled person ignores the socially-constructed nature of disability – its harms and inconveniences are largely because the built environment is made for able-bodied people.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
4 Comments
Charities are profitable businesses that sustain generous wages for people living in first world countries so I don’t think their agenda is to fix poverty, it is to make a sustainable business out of small relief. Charities exploit the problems of individuals and communities to appropriate funds, lie about what they do with the money raised and make questionable difference from generation to generation. It is sad that the beliefs of people like Singer are given such significance, we have so far to go in real understanding and insight if this is as good as it gets. To say that a newborn baby has no consciousness reflects his ignorance – why is he called a big thinker when he speaks with such narrow views that don’t appear to be well researched?
ReplyThe problem with the drowning kid situation being akin to poverty abroad is a lie. We didn’t build the pond the kid is drowning in, but we for sure did generate poverty abroad. That is non-debatable. We pay cents to the guy that grows coffee, and fortunes to the guy that markets it. Why? Because that’s how we can afford the shoes we don’t want to ruin when saving a drowning kid. We generate millions of tonnes of garbage the poor have to live with. Do we clean our own garbage? No, we don’t want to dirty our shoes!
ReplyVery interesting summary. Obviously there is a lot of detail behind this, but it did prompt me to wonder: On Singer’s argument, would eating meat be acceptable to him if the animal in question did not, in fact suffer? For example, it was reared well and either died of old age, or was killed in a very humane manner (instantly, didn’t see it coming)?
I am also interested in whether his view on later-term abortions and infanticide might perhaps lead him to think veal was an ethically acceptable meal, but beef not?
ReplyAs regular human beings, we have innate responses to give love in the way of caring for an infant, caring for each other e.g. ageing family member, to respond to someone in trouble, or in need so this innate response carries over to other living things in our surroundings.
We know that animals feel pain just like us. They can pick up on intonation of our voices, can learn and understand our signals and instructions. This signifies intelligence and wanting to please humans. They are very forgiving when they have been cruelly mistreated and suffer greatly at our actions.
If we have a better alternative than killing an animal, why would we do so? In the case of suffering due to drought and disease then this would be seen as necessary to alleviate pain and suffering because of no hope in their survival.
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Should you give equal consideration to the interests of all sentient beings?