The Life You Can Save: How To Do Your Part To End World Poverty

Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher currently teaching at Princeton University. His work in moral philosophy spans a variety of global issues including food, poverty, and bioethics. He argues from a utilitarian perspective aimed at effective altruism. Singer’s most famous works are Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues for veganism and the equal consideration of nonhuman animals, and The Life You Can Save (2009), concerned with effectively increasing aid to the poorest and most desperate people. Singer followed the latter with The Most Good You Can Do (2015) and published an updated and expanded edition in 2019, a free version of which is available at his nonprofit’s website. Singer is also the author of Practical Ethics (1979), an important work in the field of applied ethical philosophy.

Singer was born in 1946 in Australia. He studied at the University of Melbourne and subsequently at Oxford. Over the course of his academic and activist career Singer has founded multiple organizations and written dozens of books and articles. Animal Liberation is a foundational text in the animal rights movement; it has inspired thousands of activists concerned with factory farming, animal welfare, and veganism. Philosophically, Singer advocates for a brand of consequentialist philosophy called utilitarianism, an ethical theory advocating equal consideration for the welfare of all creatures capable of suffering.

Since the publication of The Life You Can Save, Singer has helped found an organization of the same name. The Life You Can Save adopts the principles of Singer’s book to promote responsible, effective altruism by curating lists of the best charities for specific causes. More information can be found at its website.

In 2021 Singer received the Berggruen Prize for his excellence in public philosophy. The prize comes with a $1 million award. Unsurprisingly, Singer has agreed to give that money to charitable organizations that he believes will maximize outcomes for causes he cares about, including animal welfare and global poverty.