Peter Singer

Born 6 July 1946, Singer built his career at Monash University, where he twice chaired the philosophy department and founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1975 he published Animal Liberation, the case for veganism that reshaped how millions thought about what they ate. His essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" followed the same unsentimental logic outward: if you can prevent suffering at little cost to yourself, you must. For decades he held to preference utilitarianism, but in 2014's The Point of View of the Universe, co-written with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, he disclosed the turn to hedonistic utilitarianism. He co-founded Animals Australia, launched the non-profit The Life You Can Save, stood unsuccessfully for the Australian Senate as a Greens candidate in 1996, and now holds the title Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton.