Peter Singer

In this course

Singer appears in the course primarily as a foundational figure in utilitarian ethics whose framework shapes contemporary Effective Altruism (EA), a movement that attempts to apply calculation and optimization to moral problems including technological deployment. The course reading invokes Singer's utilitarian logic—particularly his willingness to apply cost-benefit reasoning to vulnerable populations—as a cautionary precedent for how EA's instrumental rationality, when imported into discussions of AI and automation, risks collapsing complex ethical questions into quantifiable metrics. This historical reference suggests the course is concerned with how philosophical frameworks that enable "rational" moral reasoning can obscure rather than clarify the stakes of technological systems that affect human life.

Background

Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian moral philosopher who is Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer's work specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He wrote the book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues for vegetarianism, and the essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which argues the moral imperative of donating to help the poor around the world. For most of his career he was a preference utilitarian. He revealed in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian.

Mentioned in 1 reading