Thinker · TH-0328
Peter Singer
Peter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher who has taught at Monash University and Princeton University. A utilitarian, he helped make applied ethics a…
Peter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher who has taught at Monash University and Princeton University. A utilitarian, he helped make applied ethics a working discipline, writing on world poverty, euthanasia and above all the treatment of animals. Animal Liberation argued for equal consideration of interests regardless of species, and in The Expanding Circle he traced the widening of moral concern beyond kin and group.
Key ideas
- Equal consideration of interests: like interests count equally, whoever's they are.
- Speciesism, discounting the interests of animals because they belong to another species, is a prejudice comparable to racism.
- If we can prevent something very bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought to do it.
- Moral concern has expanded over history from family and tribe towards all sentient beings.
Major works
- Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972)
- Animal Liberation (1975)
- Practical Ethics (1979)
- The Expanding Circle (1981)
In the conversation
- Debate The argument from marginal cases has never been properly answered
- Question I butcher pigs at work and my dog sleeps on my bed. Is that inconsistent?
- Discussion Monks take the great vows, I take the small ones: is a graded ethic a cop-out?
- Question Can Kant’s rule against treating others merely as means be stretched to cover animals?
- Question Why does Cora Diamond say we don’t eat our dead, and what does that have to do with animals?
- Debate Doing harm and allowing harm differ morally, even when the outcome is the same
- Debate Strong moral intuitions count as evidence, in the same way that perceptions count as evidence