Peter Singer was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of
Melbourne and the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Oxford, La Trobe
University and Monash University, and has held several other visiting appointments. Since 1999 he
has been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at
Princeton University. From 2005 on, he has also held the part-time position of Laureate Professor
at the University of Melbourne, first in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, and then
in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies.
Peter Singer first became well-known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation. His
other books include: Democracy and Disobedience; Practical Ethics; The Expanding Circle; Marx;
Hegel; Animal Factories (with Jim Mason); The Reproduction Revolution (with Deane Wells),
Should the Baby Live? (with Helga Kuhse), How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death, Ethics
into Action, A Darwinian Left, One World, Pushing Time Away, The President of Good and Evil,
How Ethical is Australia? (with Tom Gregg), The Way We Eat (with Jim Mason), The Life You Can
Save and The Point of View of the Universe (with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek). He also coauthored The Greens with Bob Brown, founder of the Australian Greens. Books he has edited or
co-edited include Test-Tube Babies; In Defence of Animals; Applied Ethics; Animal Rights and
Human Obligations; Embryo Experimentation; A Companion to Ethics; The Great Ape Project,
Ethics, A Companion to Bioethics, Bioethics, The Moral of the Story, In Defense of Animals: The
Second Wave, Stem Cell Research, The Bioethics Reader and J. M. Coetzee and Ethics. His
works have appeared in more than 30 languages. He is the author of the major article on Ethics in
the current edition of the Encylopaedia Britannica.
Two collections of his writings have been
published: Writings on an Ethical Life, which he edited, and Unsanctifying Human Life, edited by
Helga Kuhse. There are also two collections of critical essays about his work, which include his
responses: Singer and His Critics, edited by Dale Jamieson, and Peter Singer Under Fire, edited by
Jeffrey Schaler. The latter includes a 75 page “Intellectual Autobiography.”
Peter Singer was the founding President of the International Association of Bioethics, and with
Helga Kuhse, founding co-editor of the journal Bioethics. Outside academic life, is the co-founder,
and President, of The Great Ape Project, an international effort to obtain basic rights for
chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans.
Peter Singer is married, with three daughters. His recreations, apart from reading and writing,
include hiking and surfing.