Peter Singer

Peter Singer was born in Melbourne, Australia after his Viennese Jewish parents immigrated to Australia. His father was an exporter of tea while his mother was a doctor. Singer’s family had a violent history of their ancestors dying in concentration camps.

To attain formal education, Singer attended Preshil School and Scotch College. He did his BA degree from the University of Melbourne in law, history and philosophy in 1967 and completed his MA from the same university in 1969.

He went to the University of Oxford on a scholarship and earned his B.Phil in 1971; he did a thesis on civil disobedience, which was published as a book in 1973, titled ‘Democracy and Disobedience’.

Singer published an article in 1971, ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, one of his most famous philosophical essays. In the essay, he has discussed how and why people should make charities and save the people who are dying of starvation.

In 1975, Singers’ book ‘Animal Liberation’ came out in which he talked about animal welfare and how we practice ‘speciesism’ in our modern culture. In his book he supported the concept of vegetarianism and veganism.

During the same time, he was appointed as a Radcliffe lecturer at University College, Oxford and was also an active visiting faculty at the New York University. He went back to Melbourne after some time and spent most of his literary career there.

From 1976-1981, Singer published works like: ‘Animal Rights and Human Obligations: An Anthology’ (1976), ‘Practical Ethics’ (1979), ‘Marx: A Very Short Introduction’ (1980), ‘Animal Factories’ (1980), ‘The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology’ (1981).

He was made the chair of philosophy at the Monash University in 1977, where he also became the first director of the Centre for Human Bioethics. Later, he founded the International Association of Bioethics.

In 1979, Singer published ‘Practical Ethics’, which is considered as one of his most wide-ranged works. He has discussed the various interests of the livings beings in details and the quality of a human being to invariably avoid pain.

‘How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest’ published in 1993 is amongst Singer’s popular philosophical writings, delving into the quest of finding a reasonable ethical structure in today’s scenario.

In 2009, ‘The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty’ became one of his most comprehensive humanitarian writings, discussing the immorality of today’s generation in not coming together and eradicating poverty.