The Singer Solution to World Poverty

Australian philosopher Peter Singer was born in 1946 to Jewish parents who fled persecution in Vienna, Austria, when the Nazis came to power. In his twenties, while he was studying philosophy at the University of Oxford, an encounter with a colleague who chose not to eat meat led Singer to become a vegetarian and to author Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals in 1975. During his successful academic career, Singer has earned prestigious appointments at several universities, including Princeton, and has become an increasingly influential, if controversial, voice, on bioethical matters.

In addition to animal rights, Singer takes a strong interest in such issues as environmentalism, reproductive rights, euthanasia, and poverty. The views he expressed in his 1999 article, “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” are evident much earlier in his career. In his 1972 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Singer famously used the analogy of a drowning child to make a similar argument that the wealthy have a moral obligation to the poor, no matter how far apart they are. In these and other matters, Singer draws on the utilitarian school of philosophy, in which actions that lead to happiness and pleasure are preferred to those that cause pain.