Peter Singer (1946-) is an Australian utilitarian philosopher whose work has been influential both within academic analytical-philosophy and in broader ethical debates about animal rights, global poverty, and charitable giving. He is perhaps best known as the intellectual founder of the effective-altruism movement and for his arguments about animal liberation.
Utilitarian foundations
Singer represents a strand within analytic ethics that explicitly rejects reliance on ‘our moral intuitions’. As Philippa Foot observed, ‘non-utilitarian principles are apparently deeply embedded in our ordinary morality’—Singer’s utilitarianism is marked precisely by its willingness to override these intuitive principles.
This places him in the tradition of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, applying calculative approaches to ethical questions: measuring consequences, comparing utilities, selecting actions that maximise overall happiness or preference-satisfaction.
The drowning child argument
Singer’s founding contribution to effective-altruism came in his 1972 paper ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, published in the inaugural volume of Philosophy and Public Affairs (a journal founded by analytic moral philosophers concerned with ‘real world’ issues).
The central argument proceeds by analogy:
- If you would save a drowning child from a shallow pond despite dirtying your clothes
- Then you should equally send money to distant starving children via charities, despite forgoing new clothes for yourself
The geographical and psychological distance makes no moral difference. What matters is the calculable impact on suffering and wellbeing.
Crucially, Singer takes the apparatus of charity under capitalism as given—a structural assumption that shapes effective altruism’s entire approach.
Animal liberation
Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation argued that the capacity to suffer, not species membership, determines moral status. Excluding animals from moral consideration constitutes ‘speciesism’—analogous to racism or sexism.
This utilitarian approach focuses on sentience and capacity for suffering rather than on rationality, personhood, or other traditional criteria for moral status. It has influenced both academic ethics and animal rights activism.
Practical ethics
Singer’s approach exemplifies what he calls ‘practical ethics’—applying philosophical reasoning to concrete moral problems:
- Global poverty and charitable obligations
- Animal welfare and vegetarianism
- Euthanasia and end-of-life decisions
- Reproductive ethics and abortion
- Environmental ethics
This agenda reflects analytic philosophy’s turn (from the 1970s) toward ‘applied ethics’ after decades focused on metaethics.
Effective altruism
Singer’s 1972 argument became the founding text for the effective altruism movement that emerged in the 2000s. The movement extends his reasoning:
- Ethics requires maximising measurable good outcomes
- Personal attachments and proximity are morally irrelevant prejudices
- Rational actors should maximise wealth to redirect it through charitable giving
- Calculations should prioritise potential future people over present needs
Singer’s work provided philosophical legitimation for a movement that has cultivated deep ties with tech billionaires and neoliberal wealth accumulation.
Controversial positions
Singer’s utilitarian commitments lead to positions many find deeply counter-intuitive:
- Arguments for infanticide in certain circumstances (based on personhood criteria)
- Challenging the moral significance of species boundaries
- Prioritising measurable outcomes over care relationships
- Overriding common-sense moral distinctions when calculations demand it
These positions illustrate both utilitarianism’s willingness to follow arguments where they lead and its detachment from embedded ethical life.
Critical perspective
Singer’s work exemplifies certain tendencies within analytic ethics:
- Calculative approaches divorced from human care and relationships
- Abstraction from structural and political questions (taking capitalism as given)
- Methodological individualism in ethical reasoning
- Ahistorical and acultural framing of moral problems
His rejection of moral intuitions, while distinguishing him from much contemporary analytic philosophy, leaves him ‘thrown back’ into what critics call ‘extremely crude eighteenth-century style reasoning’. The alternative to intuition-based philosophy, in Singer’s work, becomes utilitarian calculation—itself philosophically impoverished.
Legacy
Singer’s influence extends beyond academic philosophy:
- Helped shape contemporary animal rights movements
- Founded the intellectual framework for effective altruism
- Brought ethical philosophy into public discourse on poverty and charity
- Demonstrated both the strengths and limitations of utilitarian reasoning applied to contemporary moral problems
His work raises fundamental questions about the relationship between philosophical ethics and lived moral experience, about the role of calculation in ethical life, and about whether abstraction from social structure serves or undermines ethical reasoning.
Further reading
- Singer, P. (1972). ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1
- Singer, P. (1975). Animal Liberation
- Singer, P. (1979). Practical Ethics
- Critical responses from virtue ethics, care ethics, and structural approaches to social justice