Welcome to Bold Reasoning with Peter Singer
Hi, I’m Peter Singer, and I'm delighted to welcome you to my Substack: Bold Reasoning.
In December, I taught my last class at Princeton University. If you missed my final lecture, you can watch it here. In January, I sent the text of my next book, Consider the Turkey, to Princeton University Press (a very short book to be released before Thanksgiving). Right now, for the first time in many years, I don’t have a book project in progress. Instead, I’m looking for new ways of communicating my ideas – more specifically, through Substack and a podcast I’m planning.
Perhaps you've heard some call me the "world's most influential living philosopher." That's a label I’m willing to own, although it doesn’t say much for philosophy as a source of influence. Much my influence stems from the debates I’ve sparked on the ethics of our treatment of animals, on what we ought to be doing to assist people in extreme poverty, and on life and death issues in bioethics. Some of these debates have been intense, and there have even been attempts to deplatform me and ban me from speaking. Fortunately, the attempts usually fail. The media reports them, though, with the inevitable result that my views reach a far larger audience than they would have without those attempts to silence me.
Over the years, I've written a surprising number of books, articles, and opinion columns. If you're interested in diving deeper, you'll find my bio, writings, and more on my website.
What got me here?
Animal Liberation:
It all started back in 1970, when I was a graduate student at Oxford. A chance lunch with Richard Keshen, a Canadian graduate student and a vegetarian, introduced me to concerns about factory farming and the ethics of how we treat non-human animals. Eventually, I wrote Animal Liberation, sometimes described as the “bible” of the animal rights movement. It was published in 1975 and has never been out of print. Yet, there’s so much more to do! That’s why, last year, I released Animal Liberation Now.
I’ve been active in the animal movement in England, Australia and the US. I co-founded the Australian Federation of Animal Societies, now Animals Australia, the largest organisation advocating strongly for all animals in that country. I also worked with Henry Spira in the United States and wrote about his remarkable work in Ethics into Action: Learning from a Tube of Toothpaste. Together with Jim Mason, I wrote The Ethics of What We Eat.
I’ve been a vegetarian since 1971, and now describe myself as a flexible vegan, meaning that I am mostly vegan, but not strict about avoiding food containing egg or dairy products when it is difficult to do so. The point is, in my view, not to keep myself pure, but to minimize support for industries that are causing billions of animals to lead miserable lives and to die in painful ways. Thanks to the encouraging spread of vegan foods and restaurants in so many countries over the past decade, it’s much now easier than ever to be vegan.
I support organizations trying to reduce the suffering of animals, especially animals raised or killed for food, because the number of animals and the quantity of suffering in factory farming dwarfs every other abuse of animals. If you’d like to help animals with charitable giving, please consider the recommendations of Animal Charity Evaluators.
Bioethics:
I’ve always been interested in ethical questions that have some application to the decisions we make in our lives. Obviously, the life and death decisions that doctors make for their patients, or in consultation with their patients, raise important ethical issues. In addition, soon after I was appointed to the chair of philosophy at Monash University, in Australia, in 1977, the birth of the first human ever to be conceived outside the human body led to a widespread discussion of the ethics of in vitro fertilization. Initially, these discussions were dominated by bishops and theologians. Sometimes they would debate scientists, who can provide facts but don’t necessarily have expertise in ethics. I knew that philosophy could play an important role in these discussions,
I have written about these and other issues in several books, including Rethinking Life and Death, Practical Ethics and Ethics in the Real World.
Effective Altruism:
Effective altruism is built on the simple but unsettling idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good one can. Often, the most practical way of doing this is giving to effective organizations, but effective altruism can also affect your career choice and the voluntary work you do.
Doing the most good you can may mean reducing the suffering of other people or of animals or reducing the risks of future catastrophes. In addition to my work for animals, my focus has been on improving the lives of people in extreme poverty. In my 1972 article “Famine, Affluence and Morality” (now a short book), I asked readers to imagine walking by a shallow pond when they see that a small child has fallen in and seems likely to drown. I suggested they would likely rush in to save the child, even if it meant ruining an expensive pair of shoes they are wearing, and they would think very badly of someone who lets the child drown rather than ruin their shoes. What, then, should we think of people who spend money on things they do not need, when they could instead donate to organizations proven to save the lives of people in extreme poverty, or dramatically improve their lives, often at a modest cost?
I developed my argument for this thinking most fully in my books The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do, and I co-founded the non-profit organization The Life You Can Save in order to promote effective giving to help people in extreme poverty.
If you’d like to learn more about effective altruism, I offer a free online course on this topic here.
What to Expect from Bold Reasoning
So, the truth is, I don’t know yet how this will turn out, how much I can write, or what forms the posts will take. To start, I will aim for one significant note a week. And I hope to publish one other type of content each week: perhaps another note, or some audio, or a prompt for discussion, or all of that. Your thoughts and ideas will always be very welcome.
What I do know is that in this Substack I will draw on over 50 years of thinking: from animal rights to global poverty to bioethics, and more generally, how to live well, both in an ethical sense and in the sense of living an enjoyable and rewarding life.
About Paid Subscriptions
I do not need to earn income from Substack, but I've decided to offer a paid subscription option in order to support The Life You Can Save. If you wish to support my efforts, consider upgrading your subscription ($70/year), giving someone else a gift subscription, or contributing to The Life You Can Save
I am also open to donating to non-profit organizations working to reduce the suffering of animals in intensive animal production. Just let me know if that is where you would like your subscription to go. For transparency, I will disclose financial details regarding the subscriptions and donations at the start of next year, ensuring you know where your generous support is directed. I may revise this policy after the first year once I understand the Substack world better and see how much work it takes to run this Substack.
Lifesaver subscribers will also be invited to biannual group Zoom calls as a token of my gratitude.
Welcome, and thanks for joining me on this venture into Bold Reasoning. Let’s see where it takes us. If you like what you find here, please recommend it to your friends.
Peter Singer
