He told me that he missed seeing his children and hugging his grandchildren but that he “probably got more work done than I would have in a normal year.” He also surfed, a hobby he picked up in his fifties. Singer spent the past year at home in Melbourne with his wife of fifty-two years, Renata. That year, he was profiled in this magazine by Michael Specter the piece was titled “ The Dangerous Philosopher.” On Friday, Singer and two fellow-ethicists launched a peer-reviewed publication called the Journal of Controversial Ideas. In 1999, the disability-rights group Not Dead Yet protested his appointment at Princeton, where he still teaches. In the decades since, a number of his lectures have been disrupted by demonstrators or cancelled altogether. In his book “ Practical Ethics,” from 1979, he argued that parents should have the right to end the lives of newborns with severe disabilities. Others have discovered Singer’s work because of the controversies he has ignited. They have also influenced the Giving Pledge, a philanthropic campaign launched by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates. His ideas about our ethical obligation to help people in extreme poverty, first expressed in his essay “ Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” from 1972, and later in his book “ The Life You Can Save,” from 2009, are foundational to the effective-altruism movement, which encourages people in wealthy countries to donate large sums to charities that measurably improve the most lives. (He’s just edited a new version of Apuleius’ “ The Golden Ass,” a second-century Roman novel which, he told me, can be read as a “kind of adventure fiction.” He explained, “The author clearly has some sympathy with animals.”) Singer calls himself a consequentialist: he believes that actions should be judged by their consequences. He has written about birth and death, Hegel and Marx, political philosophy and globalization, and many other topics.
Singer, who is seventy-four, is now the author of seventeen books and the editor or co-author of two dozen more. In 1975, Singer expanded the essay into a book, which has been translated into dozens of languages and helped inspire the modern animal-rights movement. Robert Silvers, the magazine’s longtime editor, not only published it he became a vegetarian, too. A few years later, in 1973, Singer proposed an essay called “ Animal Liberation” to The New York Review of Books. Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher, became a vegetarian in his mid-twenties, after a fellow Oxford graduate student told him, over a spaghetti lunch, about the brutality of factory farms.
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