Peter Singer

Peter Singer (Melbourne, Australia, 1946) obtained a BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford (1971) with a thesis titled “Democracy and Disobedience,” later translated into Spanish. After teaching at the universities of Oxford, New York and La Trobe (Australia), in 1977 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, likewise in Australia, where he also served as Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics and Co-Director of the Institute for Ethics and Public Policy. Today he is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University (which he joined in 1999), combining his position there with that of Laureate Professor in the University of Melbourne School of Historical and Philosophical Studies between 2013 and 2019. Since 1974 – the year of Animal Liberation, his second book – he has published over 50 titles as author, co-author, editor or co-editor, translated into 25 languages. Singer is founder of the organizations Animals Australia and The Life You Can Save, was foundation president of the International Association of Bioethics, and has served on the editorial boards of journals including Ethics, International Journal for the Study of Animal Problems and Bioethics.

Peter Singer is referred to in the citation as “one of today’s most influential moral philosophers.” His work, says the committee, “has marked a turning point by extending the scope of ethics, providing a basis for their application to the animal domain. This signal contribution has had major consequences for international animal welfare legislation as well as for moral progress.”

For his nominator Juan Valdés Villanueva, Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Oviedo, “Singer marks a before and after in the moral consideration of animals. When I met him decades back he seemed like someone on the fringes, but there is now no disputing his enormous impact in providing a theoretical foundation for movements in defense of animal rights and the legislation enacted in various countries to ensure their protection.”

From “speciesism” to “expanding the circle of ethics”

For Peter Singer, “the boundary of our species is not itself a morally crucial distinction,” since the other animals with whom we share the planet are also capable of feeling pleasure and pain. “The fact that they are not members of the species Homo sapiens does not make their pain less important, ethically, than the pain of a member of our species. Pain is pain, and it’s equally bad whichever being suffers it.” This is the core idea behind his book Animal Liberation (1975), which rocked the foundations of ethics almost fifty years ago by expanding the scope of moral consideration to encompass other species. The book’s impact, moreover, was not confined to the academic milieu of applied ethics, it also provided a conceptual grounding for animal welfare movements worldwide.

Applying the utilitarian principles of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which proclaim that the goal of ethics should invariably be to maximize happiness and minimize suffering, Singer argued that if animals are sentient beings, with the ability to feel pleasure and suffer pain, there can be no legitimate reason for excluding them from our moral consideration.

Bentham himself, in a pioneering text of 1789, asked whether animals might one day “acquire rights,” and concluded that the deciding criterion was not “Can they reason?” or “Can they talk?” but “Can they suffer?” Following the same line of thought, Singer defined the exclusion of other sentient species from our moral consideration as “speciesism”; no less arbitrary a form of discrimination than racism or sexism, which relegate people for reason of their skin color or gender.

Singer recalls that, during his childhood and teenage years, “I did not grow up as an animal lover. We did not have pets around the house.” It was only when, aged 24, he met a fellow student who had become a vegetarian – “something very unusual in the Europe of the 1970s” ­– that he began thinking about the moral status of animals. He was studying for a doctorate at Oxford at the time, and shortly afterwards decided to give up meat. “I am an example of the power of reasoning to change the way a person thinks. It was my ability to reason and think, more than my emotional impulses, that led me to make the treatment of animals one of the major ethical issues that I have worked on.”

The suffering of other sentient beings

“My question,” he relates, “was essentially as follows. If we reject racism and sexism, and believe that all humans have some sort of basic rights, or a moral status that means we can’t just use them for our own purposes: Why do we draw the line at the boundary of our species? What is so special or magical in ethical terms about being a member of the species Homo sapiens?”

Elaborating on Bentham’s ideas, Singer proposed that rationality or the use of language are insufficient reasons for excluding animals from our moral consideration, since in fact not all human beings can reason or speak (be it due to age during infancy or some infirmity or accident), and that does not place them beyond the boundary of our ethical concern. “The key,” he concludes, “is suffering. We are morally responsible for how we act toward beings who suffer, particularly if we inflict suffering on them that is greater than the benefits for us, which is very often the case.”

Applying this logic in his book Animal Liberation, he argued that the suffering of animals, for example in factory farms, recreational activities like circuses and popular festivities, and experiments insufficiently justified by the benefits of drug development for serious diseases, was ethically unacceptable.

Six years after Animal Liberation, Singer developed his ideas in a new book titled The Expanding Circle, in which he asserted that widening the circle of beings to whom we extend moral consideration exemplifies the power of reason as a motor of humanity’s moral progress, by extending our feelings of empathy “first from the tribe to the nation, then to the race or ethnic group, then to all human beings, and, finally, to non-human animals.”

Contrary to those who may believe that “evolution leads to the selection of individuals who think only of their own interests, and those of their kin, because genes for such traits would be more likely to spread,” the use of reason, he says, “enables us to see that others, previously outside the bounds of our moral view, are like us in relevant respects. Excluding them from the sphere of beings to whom we owe moral consideration can then seem arbitrary, or just plain wrong.”

A philosophical foundation for animal welfare movements and laws

Animal Liberation, translated into over 30 languages, has now been shaking the world’s conscience for five decades and, as the Frontiers committee notes, “has had major consequences for international animal welfare legislation as well as for moral progress.” Singer himself remarks that many of the practices described in the book’s first edition, like keeping hens in wire cages so small that they cannot spread their wings, or confining calves or pigs in such narrow stalls that they cannot turn round or walk more than a step, have since been banned throughout the European Union and in other countries, as well as in some U.S. states including California.

There has also been progress, the awardee points out, regarding the use of animals for scientific experimentation: “There is more control and the European Union has again been a leader, such that testing cosmetics on animals has been outlawed across its member states.”

But although much has been achieved, Singer considers that “there is still a very long way to go” to improve animal welfare. The biggest challenge he sees is to do something about the commercial raising and killing of animals for food, because that is by far the largest area of human abuse of animals. “If we just consider vertebrate animals on land,” he says, “we’re talking about something like 70 to 80 billion animals produced each year. And if we include fish as well, that would add another 120 billion to the total tally.”

He remains hopeful that technology will help by enabling animal products to be developed using cell cultures, so meat can be produced with no suffering involved and with the added bonus of mitigating climate change. “The greenhouse gas emissions of the meat industry are very significant, and if we can replace that meat with plant based foods, or with cellular meat, we will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and give ourselves more time to avoid that tipping point where the climate of the entire planet is irreparably damaged for centuries to come.”