Peter Singer Is Still Interested in Controversial Ideas - The New Yorker

12/3/23, 11:50 Peter Singer Is Still Interested in Controversial Ideas | The New Yorker
The New Yorker Interview
Peter Singer Is Committed

to Controversial Ideas
The philosopher of animal liberation and effective altruism
considers cancellation, capitalism, and the pandemic.
By Daniel A. Gross
April 25, 2021
Photographs by Alana Holmberg for The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/peter-singer-is-committed-to-controversial-ideas 1/30
eter Singer, the Australian philosopher, became a vegetarian in his

P mid-twenties, after a fellow Oxford graduate student told him, over a
spaghetti lunch, about the brutality of factory farms. A few years later, in
1973, Singer proposed an essay called “Animal Liberation” to The New York
Review of Books. Robert Silvers, the magazine’s longtime editor, not only
published it; he became a vegetarian, too. In 1975, Singer expanded the
essay into a book, which has been translated into dozens of languages and
helped inspire the modern animal-rights movement.
Singer, who is seventy-four, is now the author of seventeen books and the
editor or co-author of two dozen more. He has written about birth and
death, Hegel and Marx, political philosophy and globalization, and many
other topics. (He’s just edited a new version of Apuleius’ “The Golden
Ass,” a second-century Roman novel which, he told me, can be read as a
“kind of adventure fiction.” He explained, “The author clearly has some
sympathy with animals.”) Singer calls himself a consequentialist: he
believes that actions should be judged by their consequences. His ideas
about our ethical obligation to help people in extreme poverty, first
expressed in his essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” from 1972, and
later in his book “The Life You Can Save,” from 2009, are foundational to
the effective-altruism movement, which encourages people in wealthy
countries to donate large sums to charities that measurably improve the
most lives. They have also influenced the Giving Pledge, a philanthropic
campaign launched by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates.
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Others have discovered Singer’s work because of the controversies he has

ignited. In his book “Practical Ethics,” from 1979, he argued that parents
should have the right to end the lives of newborns with severe disabilities.
In the decades since, a number of his lectures have been disrupted by
demonstrators or cancelled altogether. In 1999, the disability-rights group
Not Dead Yet protested his appointment at Princeton, where he still
teaches. That year, he was profiled in this magazine by Michael Specter;
the piece was titled “The Dangerous Philosopher.” On Friday, Singer and
two fellow-ethicists launched a peer-reviewed publication called the
Journal of Controversial Ideas.
Singer spent the past year at home in Melbourne with his wife of fifty-two
years, Renata. He told me that he missed seeing his children and hugging
his grandchildren but that he “probably got more work done than I would
have in a normal year.” He also surfed, a hobby he picked up in his fifties.
In our three conversations by video chat, he joined me from a spare white
study with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Our conversations have been
edited for length and clarity.
Have you been thinking about the philosophical implications of the

pandemic?
There are specific issues that I’ve been interested in. How should we
distribute the vaccine? How do we decide whether the lockdown is
justified? If we’re short of intensive-care beds, of respirators, should we
give preference to people who are younger and therefore will have longer
to live, or other people who might have equal need but a much shorter life
expectancy? I think the pandemic sharpens, and forces us to answer, a lot
of questions that were lurking—it’s not as if, before the pandemic, there
weren’t people dying from preventable diseases that we could have helped
but didn’t. The pandemic has affected us greatly, but it hasn’t killed as
many people as die every year from preventable, poverty-related causes.
I was surprised, going through some of your work, that you wrote about
pandemics in 2015, in “The Most Good You Can Do.” You talk about
the risk of a serious pandemic breaking out because of the way that we
treat animals.
There are two public-health risks in factory farms. The one that’s well
documented is the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria through
the routine feeding of antibiotics to factory-farm animals. The pandemic
stuff was a bit more speculative, but, in 2009, when we got the swine-flu
pandemic, one that implicated factory pig farms pretty directly, I started
talking about it occasionally.
When I started thinking about the treatment of animals and became a

vegetarian, it was entirely because of concern for what we do to animals.
Then along came climate change. And although, at first, that seemed to be
about fossil-fuel burning, it turns out that meat production is a significant
contributor. So then you get an additional reason for not eating meat or for
being vegan. With the pandemic, we’ve got another major reason.
The vast majority of vaccines have been “reserved” by wealthy nations,

and so hundreds of millions of doses go first to the U.S. and Europe. I’m
wondering how much this bothers you and what should be done about
it.
I think it’s disgraceful that the vaccines are being bought up by wealthy
countries—some of which, I should say, have relatively low need. We have
very few cases in Australia but have ordered more than enough vaccines to
vaccinate everyone in the country.
Where does responsibility lie for making the distribution more

equitable?
We don’t have a world government, so we are a world of sovereign nations

—and those governments should be getting together so that the burden is
distributed equitably among affluent nations, just as we get together in the
Paris agreement to try to distribute the burden of reducing greenhouse
gases equitably. The World Health Organization, of course, is proposing a
scheme for a more equitable distribution, and I think governments should
be signing on to that.
The pharmaceutical companies can play a role, of course, in terms of

making some vaccines available at cost, or allowing producers in low-
income countries to produce generics. But you can’t expect
pharmaceuticals to be charities. The system of patenting rewards
companies for selling to wealthy people and doesn’t reward them for
providing drugs for people who can’t afford them. An alternative scheme,
called the Health Impact Fund, has been proposed, to which governments
would contribute funds, and they would be allocated to the extent that a
drug reduces the global burden of disease. Then the pharmaceutical
companies would have an incentive to develop those products that would
do the most to help people worldwide. That would be a much more
rational system.
How did your family first come to live in Australia?
My parents were both living in Vienna in the nineteen-thirties. They were

around thirty years old when Hitler marched into Austria, and they were
both Jewish. They realized very rapidly that they had no future in Austria.
Jews could not own businesses under Nazi laws, and my mother was just
qualified as a physician. The Nazis said that Jewish doctors could only
treat Jewish patients. I don’t think they actually, at that stage anyway, really
thought that they could be murdered. But my father wrote to an uncle in
America, and said, “Could you provide a sponsorship for me and my wife?”
And the uncle wrote back, saying, “I’m very happy to sponsor you. But,
unfortunately, as I’ve not had the opportunity to meet your wife, I can’t
sponsor her.” So, obviously, that was a pretty devastating blow.
My mother then remembered that she had met an Australian who had
come to Austria to ski, and she’d been invited to join him and some friends
at one of the wine bars on the edge of Vienna. He had then sent her a card
from Australia, thanking her for the company. She thought she would
write to this man. He was not Jewish. He was a Catholic of Irish descent,
but he was very supportive and moved rapidly to organize visas for my
father and for her. And that’s why they came to Australia. We went to see
the man who sponsored them, Jerry Donovan, in Melbourne, when I was a
child.
Of my four grandparents, one, my mother’s mother, survived the

Holocaust and came to Australia just about when I was born, in 1946. She
lived until 1955. We were very close. We had other Jewish friends in
Melbourne, some of whom had concentration-camp numbers tattooed on
their arms. I wondered what that meant.
Did your family history influence your views of ethics?
I’m sure, but I can’t say that I was really conscious of it. The elements that
I was conscious of were an abhorrence of racism and violence. I read a lot
of history of the coming of Fascism in Europe, and how the Holocaust
was conceived and planned. Some people have said, “Well, if you’re aware
of this kind of sheer physical suffering being inflicted on your family, then
it’s easier to empathize with the suffering that’s being inflicted on

nonhuman animals.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, who is no relation to me, said
the same kind of thing—in one of his stories, he has a character saying,
“For the animals, every day is Treblinka.”
In a book about your maternal grandfather, “Pushing Time Away,” you

write that he met your grandmother, in part, because he was attracted to
men, and she was attracted to women, and they were meeting to discuss
that. That seemed like a real discovery.
That was a real discovery, yes. I learned about it only when I obtained
letters that my grandfather had written to my grandmother, which had
been brought to Australia. I found this whole stack of letters in my aunt’s
apartment. I read German, but this earlier style of handwriting was a lot of
trouble to read. When I got somebody to transcribe them, I was
completely amazed. I had no idea that their original connection was
because of attractions to people of their own sex.
What motivated you to go through all that, and write a book about it in
the end?
I originally was interested in learning more about my grandfather, because

he was the person in my family who I could perhaps most see as a
forerunner to myself. I knew that he had been a member of Freud’s
Wednesday circle, that he had co-authored a paper with Freud, and that
then he had been involved with Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual
Psychology. I wanted to see: Were there any parallels between his thinking
and mine? But then I found out other things that I didn’t expect.
I got the sense, from the book, that you questioned whether it was
worthwhile to write about your family history.
That’s right. And I still have that feeling a little bit. Which of my works
have done the most good? It’s not going to be “Pushing Time Away.” It’s
going to be “Animal Liberation” or “The Life You Can Save.” I think it’s
good for my children and grandchildren, but from an impartial calculation
of how I can do the most good, this was something of an indulgence.
Peter Singer calls himself a consequentialist: he believes that actions should be judged by their
consequences.
One of the reasons that I was first drawn to your work was that it
encourages me, as an individual, to consider all the downstream
consequences of what I do. In “Animal Liberation,” you call on us to
“take responsibility for our own lives, and make them as free of cruelty
as we can.” This idea reappears in your work later on.
I think that’s right. You can compare the dollars you spend on products as
a kind of voting for that industry or method of production. “Animal
Liberation” is essentially saying, “Stop eating the products of cruelly
treated animals. You don’t need a social revolution—or the social
revolution is too difficult to achieve, and rather we should focus on getting

individuals to change their practices.” Maybe that’s had some influence on
my thinking, and why I think about individual change.
You’re saying that “Animal Liberation” perhaps carried over into the
way you framed your arguments about global poverty, in that you were
centering responsibility in the individual?
It’s possible that there’s continuity. While I was a student at Oxford, there
was a group called Radical Philosophy. A lot of the people who were
involved were influenced by a broad Marxist tradition—that is, they
thought that we needed to overthrow the capitalist system and replace it
with something better. I started to feel that there was a lot of talk going
on, and it wasn’t really making much impact.
You couldn’t live through that period without having seen footage of
starving children—particularly from the Biafra crisis, when part of Nigeria
broke away and was essentially besieged by the rest of Nigeria. We were
living in Oxford, which is where Oxfam, the international aid
organization, had its headquarters. They seemed to be trying to do things
along the right lines, and so we started supporting them.
A lot of people thought that we don’t have to help people in extreme
poverty, because we’re not responsible for their poverty. You can say, “Yes,
we are responsible because we benefit from an unequal global trading
system,” but that’s a complicated debate. I was trying to cut around that by
saying, “Look, if you came across a child drowning in a shallow pond, and
you could rescue that child at relatively minor cost to yourself, but you just
decided not to do it because you didn’t want to ruin your clothes, that
would be horrible.” But, then, if you accept that, you are accepting that we
have responsibilities for people who are in need.
You seem to be a skeptic of Marx’s ideas in practice. Why did you write a
book about Marx?
I was invited to do a book for an Oxford series. I had studied Marx when I
was a graduate student, and there was this view of early Marx, largely
based on some unpublished writings, that was all about alienation, and
that there was a decisive break that came somewhere around 1848—first
you had the kind of Hegelian-philosophy Marx, and then you had the
different, scientific Marxism, and there wasn’t much of a connection
between the two. In studying this, I’d been persuaded that was wrong, that
there was continuity, and that you could explain what Marx was on about
in his later writings by looking at the early writings—and that this also
explained some of the flaws in Marx’s thinking. The idea that history is
leading toward this goal, where all the contradictions will be resolved,
came straight from Hegel. I think there are some interesting critiques of
what’s going on in capitalist societies, but he really thinks that the
revolution is inevitable. I think that was clearly wrong.
It seems like one of your least “instructive” books, in terms of how to

live.
That’s true. I guess it’s one way in which we ought not to live. And that is
still relevant because, very often, when I speak about global poverty,
somebody gets up and says, “Well, isn’t the problem really capitalism? And
shouldn’t we be doing what we can do to overthrow capitalism?”
It seems to me that the movement that has grown up around your

philosophical work has ended up being very compatible with capitalism,
in the sense that some of its practitioners are people who set out to earn
a lot of money—some of them are billionaires who have decided to give
away the money that they’ve amassed. Was that something you
expected, for capitalism to almost be incorporated into your

philosophical work?
I don’t think capitalism is incorporated into my philosophical work. I think

my philosophical work is neutral about what is the best economic system
—but it’s also realistic, and I think we’re stuck with capitalism for the
foreseeable future. We are going to continue to have billionaires, and it’s
much better that we have billionaires like Bill and Melinda Gates or
Warren Buffett, who give away most of their fortune thoughtfully and in
ways that are highly effective, than billionaires who just build themselves
bigger and bigger yachts.
Does that mean you’re not that interested in the question of whether
billionaires should exist?
Look, I think it would be better if you had an economic system in which

we didn’t have billionaires—but the productivity that billionaires have
generated was still there, and that money was more equitably distributed.
But, really, there hasn’t been a system that has had equity in its distribution
and the productivity that capitalism has had. I don’t see that happening
anytime soon. If one country starts to tax billionaires so that there can’t be
any billionaires, those billionaires are going to go to other countries where
they can continue to be billionaires.
One thing that surprised me, in “The Life You Can Save,” is that you
argue in favor of very high salaries for C.E.O.s. You also write that
inequality is a problem only insofar as it leads to oppressive
relationships—that inequality in itself is not wrong.
I think my point there was simply that it’s rational for corporations that
are doing billions of dollars’ worth of business to be prepared to pay tens of
millions of dollars to hire somebody who can maintain that level of
profitability. That makes perfect sense. So I don’t think we should be

surprised by the way they do it now.
If you’re asking me, “Would it be a better system if no C.E.O. would want

to earn fifty million dollars?” Yeah, that would be a better ethos. But I see
the difficulties in a real transformation, not only in a culture, but perhaps
pushing against some aspects of human nature that a culture has
emphasized and that people then come to see as natural. It’s not easy to
change that.
And that aspect of the culture, in this case, is self-interest?
Yeah, and a belief in market competitiveness, I guess. And an assessment

of worth in terms of how much you earn, rather than the social good that
you produce. But there are lots of books that have been pointing this out
and have said, “This is not good, and we should change.” But it doesn’t
seem that writing books about this actually has a very lasting impact. I
suppose I’ve come to think that encouraging people—wealthy people—to
give fifty per cent of their income, or all the different sliding percentages
that I talk about in “The Life You Can Save, ”that’s more likely to do some
good.
A lot of your works cite white male academics who, for lack of a better
phrase, take up a lot of space in intellectual conversations: Joshua
Greene, Steven Pinker, Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Sandel, Benedict
Anderson, John Rawls, to name a few. Because so much of your work is
fundamentally about equity, I wonder if that is something that’s on your
radar.
That’s the manner in which I was educated, I suppose, and which still is
very influential in the ideas that I’m involved with. I’ve certainly worked
with a lot of philosophers who are not male, but they have been white
generally. I’ve got a project now about the issue of global population, with
Alex Ezeh, a demographer of Nigerian origin at Drexel University. I

worked with Pascal Kasimba when I was at Monash University, who is of
African descent, on a project relating to in-vitro fertilization. I have also
co-authored things with people of Asian descent, with Yew-Kwang Ng, for
instance. But, I have to say, I want to work with people whose ideas are,
you know, at a level of discussion that I’m interested in, and that I’m
progressing. If you’re thinking of the work of Africans, for example, I don’t
know the work of many of them that is really in the same sort of—I’m not
quite sure how to put this—participating in the same discussion as the
people you’ve just mentioned.
There’s a big difference between “I haven’t found them yet” and “They
might not exist.” Do you think it’s for lack of searching? Or lack of
representation, period, across philosophy and the fields that you work
in?
There’s certainly an underrepresentation of philosophers of African or

African-American backgrounds. No question about that, in the field of
philosophy that I work in. And there is an underrepresentation of women,
although I think that’s changing. I’ve tried to encourage women in
philosophy all my career. But there’s still an underrepresentation. I was the
founding president of the International Association of Bioethics, in the
early eighties, and we did try very hard to get global representation. So I
wouldn’t say that I’ve not searched, but it’s true that that’s not been one of
my priorities, really.
I think it’s a worthwhile question, because there are moments in your

work where you argue that there should be a shift of decision-making
power away from big, powerful non-governmental organizations and
toward communities that have the best understanding of their needs.
And I wonder whether international perspectives would help you
execute the vision of effective giving and fighting world poverty. I’m
thinking, for example, of Amartya Sen as an economist who uses

philosophical frameworks to describe poverty and the right responses to
it.
Yes, but, often, the people who write those things—Sen would be a good
example—seem to be, in spirit and thought, much closer to Western élites
than they are to people in poverty in rural villages. I’m not sure that it
makes a huge difference to Sen’s writing that he has an Indian background,
really. It’s a question you can speculate on, obviously.
I probably have stayed out of discussions of race relations in America

largely because I’m not an American, and I feel as if people who’ve been
working for so long on these questions have a stronger feel for it than I do.
And I still feel a bit of an outsider in that discussion.
You’ve touched on migration here and there in your writings, and it’s
part of your family’s story. But I heard you say on a podcast that we
might actually have a moral imperative not to open borders, because it
could lead to the kind of backlash that would put the likes of Donald
Trump in power. It was a very surprising way of looking at it. What is
your view on migration? What should we be doing?
I don’t think you should find it surprising, given that I’m a

consequentialist. In an ideal world, we would have open borders, no
question about that. I think that would have many good consequences and
certainly would enable refugees to move away from situations of
oppression and genocide. Obviously, my parents did just that, and that’s
why I exist.
But I’ve seen the effect of regimes that do open borders, or nearly open
borders. I was a founding member of the Australian Greens, which said
that we should accept all the so-called boat people from Afghanistan and
Iran and other places, who were seeking asylum in Australia in the eighties
and nineties. For a time, Labor did as well. But it was clear that those
issues were exploited by the conservatives to suggest that Australia was
going to be swamped by different people, and I’m pretty sure it cost Labor
a federal election on at least one occasion. And then you see the other bad
consequences of this: not only did the borders get closed and the refugees
were put in horrible detention camps, which the conservative government
did, but they also opposed doing something on climate change. They cut
foreign aid, they run down the hospitals and schools and universities.
There is a real cost to this.
The E.U. has had to realize the same thing. You got right-wing
governments in Hungary and Poland and Italy for a while. Clearly,
immigration was a factor in Trump getting elected in 2016. So that’s why,
as a consequentialist, I think you have to have policies that include some
restrictions.
It’s a difficult standard to hold oneself to—that you can’t advocate for
positions that your political opponents might use against you. In the
U.S., we’re currently having this conversation around the slogan
“Defund the Police,” or around the prison-abolition movement. I
struggle with the idea that a consequentialist would say that we ought
not to give too much oxygen to those movements, because they might
provoke a backlash.
So you would have liked Biden, before the election, to say, “I endorse
defunding the police”?
No, but I think the presence of “Defund the Police” in our debate about
criminal justice is important, and the discussion about prison abolition
is important, even as “law and order” conservatives might use it against
anyone in the Democratic Party. I can’t imagine myself being in favor of
trying to shut down a more radical or visionary approach.
I don’t want to shut it down. I started the Journal of Controversial Ideas

because I’m a great believer in freedom of speech and freedom of
expression. But I also don’t want a progressive party to throw away its
chances of governing by embracing ideas that clearly are rejected by the
electorate.
So the order of operations is, you change hearts and minds, and then
you change policy. You don’t expect policy to do the work of convincing
people.
Yeah, that’s right. Jeremy Bentham, before the 1832 Reform Act was
passed in Britain, argued for extending the vote to all men. And he wrote
to his colleagues that he would have included women in that statement,
except that it would be ridiculed, and, therefore, he would lose the chance
of getting universal male suffrage. So he was aware of exactly this kind of
argument. Bentham also wrote several essays arguing against the
criminalization of sodomy, but he never published them in his lifetime, for
the same reason.
Does that mean that your version of consequentialism requires a certain

level of moderation, politically—that it has to always take into
consideration the possible backlash and the progress you can lose out
on, if you make the wrong argument?
Yeah, sure. I would say it just has a certain level of realism, rather than
moderation. But realism will sometimes dictate moderation.
I wanted to ask you about your work on disability, and your views on
what is permissible for a parent to do if their child is born with a
disability. This is a set of ideas that has made you very controversial, and
in some circles very unpopular. And I wonder whether you’ve ever
regretted wading into that arena, because it might make people less
likely to come to your other ideas.
Yes. I’ve wondered whether the effects were good or bad. The first public
protests against my views on disability were in Germany, starting in 1989.
After all the attention that I got because of the protests—mostly very
critical media; you know, a terrible double-page in Der Spiegel with photos
of the trucks that took Jews to prison camps—the sales multiplied ten
times. My views in Germany became far better known. As you say, I
became very unpopular in some circles, and some of my talks got cancelled.
It’s unfortunate that I get associated with these so-called “ableist” views—
and, of course, in Germany there was this horrendous link with the Nazi
so-called euthanasia program. It’s not that I haven’t ever regretted it. I
have. But, other times, when I reflect on the over-all impact, I’m not sure
that it’s been bad. I do get letters, both from people with disabilities and
parents of people with disabilities, who support my views.
Would you mind summarizing what your view was then, and whether
it’s changed at all?
My view then was that parents of children born with serious disabilities
ought to have the option of ending the life of their child, immediately
after birth or as soon as the diagnosis has been properly established. It’s
not true to say that I support euthanasia for disabled infants. It’s not true
that I think that disabled infants ought to be killed. I think the parents
ought to have that option.
Let me say a couple of things in relation to that. First, parents do have that
option, right now, in every country that allows abortion when a prenatal
diagnosis has shown that there’s a disability. I don’t draw a big distinction
between abortion and infanticide. Those who think that it’s O.K. for
women to have an abortion need to show why there’s such an important
difference between the fetus before birth and the newborn infant after
birth. Second, parents, right now, have the option of withdrawing life
support for an infant with a serious disability. I think that both of these
cases convey exactly the same attitude to disability that I’m defending. You
can say that is ableist. But some have said that I’m simply representative of
the ableist society as a whole, which supports both of these things. And I
think that’s true.
I think it’s wrong to discriminate against disabled people in employment

or housing or other areas where their disability is not relevant to their
ability to perform the job. I fully support rights for disabled people in
those respects, and for them to be in normal schools. I think it’s a complete
mistake to think that I’m opposed to people with disabilities in some way.
This is specifically something about euthanasia for newborn infants, who
are not able to have any kind of input into what they want their lives to be
like, or whether they want to live it.
I have to say that comparing abortion at six months to infanticide is the
sort of argument that one’s political opponents could use against you—
the sort of argument that, as we were talking about a minute ago, might
not be worth making because of the potential backlash.
Absolutely, and I’m glad Joe Biden didn’t make it before the last election!
I’m not advocating that any political party with a serious chance should
make this policy, although in some parts of the world, this is not so crazy.
It actually is public policy in the Netherlands.
Harriet McBryde Johnson, the disability-rights lawyer who debated you

and wrote about it in a remarkable piece for the Times Magazine, in
2003, had a lot of criticisms, but one that stayed with me is the idea that
you might not be in a position to evaluate whether her life involves more
suffering than yours, or whether she is worse off than you are—that
there might be an element of subjectivity inherent in any calculation of
suffering.
I totally agree with that. And, of course, I fully supported Harriet’s right to
continue to live and to have the best possible life she could. And her death
was a sad loss. [ Johnson, whose piece for the Times Magazine began “He
insists he doesn’t want to kill me,” died in 2008, in her sleep, at the age of
fifty.]
But that doesn’t really help the parent trying to make a decision for their
newborn infant, because their newborn infant doesn’t have the subjectivity
to express a view on it. They have to make the decision. You asked me
before whether my position has changed. It hasn’t fundamentally changed,
but I do accept exactly this point that Harriet and others have made to me
—that it’s not good enough for the parents considering this decision to
talk to their doctors. They ought to talk to people with a disability that
their child has, or, if that’s not possible, because the child has an
intellectual disability, then the parents of children with that disability. I
accept that our society does have this bias—thinking, Oh, I wouldn’t like
to live that life. And you don’t really know what that life is like nearly as
well as people who are living it or the parents of people who are living it.
That applies to abortion as well, by the way.
The bias that you described—the assumption that a person with a

disability is worse off—is that something that you recognized in yourself
as these conversations were happening?
To some extent, yeah, I think so. I thought Harriet was a very good
example of somebody who lived a rich and fulfilling life despite a severe
disability. No intellectual disability in her case, of course. She was very
sharp.
Did she change your mind in some way?
Maybe a bit. Maybe a bit.
Tell me about the Journal of Controversial Ideas.
This is a response to what I feel is a worrying trend of restricting freedom

of thought and discussion, including in academic life. Francesca Minerva,
Jeff McMahan, and I decided to create a journal that would, first, be
prepared to publish controversial ideas and not retract articles because
there were petitions or letters signed against them, and second, to allow
articles to be published under a pseudonym—which, as far as we’re aware,
no peer-reviewed academic journal does. If the argument is good, and if
the referee says, “Yes, this is well-argued,” we won’t rule it out on the
grounds that this is too controversial. It’s an attempt to provide a sort of
place that can’t be cancelled, in the sense that discussion can’t be shut
down by intimidation.
Could you tell me about some of the topics that are appearing in the first
issue?
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the first issue has a couple of papers on gender
issues. Does the term “woman” mean adult human female? And does that
suggest that there’s a biological component to it rather than simply a
matter of gender preference?
Are those papers in opposition to one another?
Yes, they are. We have another interesting paper called “Cognitive

Creationism,” which explores parallels between young-Earth creationism
and the ideological views that reject well-established facts in genetics,
particularly related to differences in cognitive abilities—across individuals,
not between demographic groups. There’s a paper discussing blackface in
terms of various cultural traditions, whether blackface can be acceptable.
There’s a defense of direct action to stop animal abuse. There’s a paper
raising the question of whether despotism is necessary to stop climate
change. There’s a paper about punishment, which contemplates enforced
coma as an alternative to long-term imprisonment. There’s a paper on the

epistemology of “no platforming,” the idea that some ideas are just so
stupid that you should not give them a platform, and arguing that that’s
not the case.
That one’s getting pretty meta, in that it’s reflecting on the endeavor in
which it’s participating.
Yes, that one is.
My perception is that there are times when freedom-of-speech

arguments provide cover to ideas that inflict harm—and that some of
these arguments come from thinkers who already do have the freedom
to express their views, as long as they’re willing to be held accountable
for them in a public forum.
The journal is particularly aimed at protecting junior academics who don’t

have tenure. But if the concern is just that people write them hate mail, I
don’t see that as an issue. Freedom of speech applies to people who write
hostile criticism on Twitter—they have freedom of speech, too. I think
you’ve just got to develop a thick skin. But if no publisher will touch them
for fear of being branded, then I think you have a problem. John Stuart
Mill says this explicitly: offense can’t be a grounds for prohibiting free
speech, because it’s just too wide.
Do you think of the protests against your work over the years as a form
of “cancellation”?
That term wasn’t around in ’89, but, yes, I think the protests in Germany
were certainly an attempt to make it impossible for me to speak publicly.
But, beyond that, it’s not so much a personal thing. You could say I’m an
unreconstructed supporter of freedom of thought and expression.
Your views were never taken out of print, and you are, of course, a
professor at Princeton who has had the ability to publish and write
freely through your career.
The initial invitation in Germany came from a conference of disability

organizations. They were pressured by some of the people there to
disinvite me. That’s fine. But I was also invited to speak at German
universities by professors who wanted to hear me speak, and the rector of
the university cancelled it.
I guess I’m having trouble seeing the line between cancellation and the
freedom of speech of your critics.
I think universities need to be a place for free discussion of ideas. Other

venues can choose who to invite.
An example comes to mind. Someone might argue for a transphobic law

that restricts the freedoms of a trans person, and that person can say,
when they’re criticized, that their freedom of speech is being curtailed.
That’s maybe part of the story. But if their advocacy is harming trans
people, I would think that harm should be the center of the
conversation.
In the actual debate, it’s not only harm to trans people—gender-critical

feminists argue that women are harmed by not having a space that is only
for biological females. If people are not allowed to say that, or are cancelled
for saying it, how are you going to get to the truth of the matter? Even the
label of “transphobia” is already, I think, prejudicial.
But I didn’t say anything about not allowing a person to speak—merely

vehemently criticizing them. And the response to that vehement
criticism is often the objection, “My freedom of speech is being
curtailed.” I assume that the actual, lived harm that trans people
experience might count more than the harm inflicted to a person whose
freedom of speech is restricted.
Why should you have to assume that? Shouldn’t that be something that
people try and produce evidence about? And that’s only half the question,
right? What you’ve got to weigh is the restrictions on trans people against
the restrictions on biological females.
I wish it weren’t a free-speech debate—I wish it were only a debate about

the substance of the claims. But people who try to raise questions from a
gender-critical feminist perspective, about the substance of the claims,
have difficulty in presenting their views.
As we talk about this, I’m thinking about “Animal Liberation.” You

write about it being a mistake to assume that one form of discrimination
is the last form of discrimination. And it occurs to me that one of the
logical consequences of this observation is that some people who view
themselves as fighting oppression may eventually be seen as
participating in oppression that they have not yet recognized. Do you
think that offering a platform to ideas that, down the road, could be seen
as oppressive is participating in the oppression?
No, I think offering a platform for reasoned argument is not participating

in oppression. I think it’s trying to get to the truth.
If, through truth-seeking, you conclude that the person’s argument has
an oppressive effect, what comes next? If it turns out that an argument
published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas causes more harm than
good, what comes next?
That is quite possible—that an individual argument might cause more

harm than good. What I and my co-editors believe is that promoting
freedom of thought and discussion, on the whole, will do more good than
harm, even if occasionally an individual article does cause more harm than
good.
What do you think is the role of accountability in this enterprise?
The way to hold academics accountable is to expose the flaws in their

argument.
But if a person publishes under a pseudonym, all that happens sort of

behind the veil of anonymity.
That’s true. They don’t get credit for the argument, at least as long as they
retain the pseudonym, and they don’t get the opprobrium for putting
forward a bad argument if the argument is exposed as wrong. I suppose we
think that it’s more important that the ideas get exposed as wrong—or
not, if they’re not.
The distinction between controversial and uncontroversial seems to rely

on an arbiter or a gatekeeper of which ideas fall within the bounds of
mainstream discussion. That puts a lot of pressure on the editorial
board needing to stand in for the culture at large. And that brings us to
the diversity of the editorial board—ideologically, and in terms of
subject matter, in terms of backgrounds.
That’s true. We have done, and are continuing to do, our best to have a
diverse editorial board. It’s certainly diverse in terms of ideological
positions. Is it diverse in terms of ethnic backgrounds, gender diversity, and
so on? I think we’ve tried, but maybe we haven’t got to where we should
be.
It did strike me as a very white group of people. I wonder if that affects

the boundaries of what the editorial board perceives as controversial—
and also as a good argument.
Well, I think we’re aware of the fact that we are predominantly white, and
we are actively looking for other people. People are welcome to self-
nominate if they wish to create that diversity, or to nominate others. To
some extent, it’s a reflection of the fact that we three co-editors are white,
and it’s those who we’re in contact with.
Would it trouble you to publish an article about race, say, without being
aware of the race of the author?
Not in itself, I think. I think a paper ought to be able to be reviewed on the

strength of its arguments. Obviously, in arguments drawing on personal
experience, identity is a relevant factor. But I think there can also be
arguments that can be assessed independently of the identity of the author.
I was curious whether you have projects that you consider unfinished
business. Projects you want to return to, or things you haven’t been able
to get to yet, that have some urgency now.
I’ve started revising “Animal Liberation.” The basic text hasn’t been
updated since the 1990 edition. In fact, I’ve got a research assistant pulling
out some papers on animal experimentation at the moment, and it’s pretty
depressing. I thought that there’d been a bigger change. I’m reading reports
that feel like I’m back in the New York Public Library in 1974, pulling out
horrible experiments from journals.
I talked about this possible book about ethics and population, with Alex
Ezeh. I think that’s an interesting issue, whether global population is or
isn’t a problem nowadays. If that goes ahead, it would be the next major
new book that I would produce.
In 1999, when you were profiled in The New Yorker, your mother was
living with dementia, and you talked to Michael Specter about the
money you were spending on her care. And the story suggested that
there might be some disconnect between your philosophical convictions

and the decisions you had to make in your own life. Is that a fair way of
describing what was going on at the time?
You know, I’ve often said that I don’t consider that I’m doing everything
that I should do. I don’t fully live up to the really high standard that you
can see in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” where I suggest that the only
real stopping place is when, if you gave any more, you’d be harming
yourself as much as you’d be benefiting the person. That’s an incredibly
demanding line, and I’ve never claimed to live up to it. I spend money on
myself and my family. The money that my sister and I spent on my
mother, and keeping her comfortable, at that level—there could have been
better things you could have done with that. But, as I say, that’s true of
many of the things that I spend money on.
I can’t think of anybody who would criticize you for doing so. But there
seems to be an implicit criticism coming from yourself.
It’s not a criticism that leaves me feeling terribly guilty, but it is an

acknowledgment that I’m not living to the highest possible moral
standards.
Do you think of yourself as a good person?
Yes, because that invites a comparison with other people, and I think by
those standards I’m a good person. But do I think of myself as an ideally
good, perfect person, the perfect person, a secular saint? Definitely not.
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Daniel A. Gross is a story editor at The New Yorker.
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12/3/23, 11:50 Peter Singer Is Still Interested in Controversial Ideas | The New Yorker

The New Yorker Interview

Peter Singer Is Committed

Photographs by Alana Holmberg for The New Yorker

eter Singer, the Australian philosopher, became a vegetarian in his

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Your e-mail address

Others have discovered Singer’s work because of the controversies he has

Have you been thinking about the philosophical implications of the

When I started thinking about the treatment of animals and became a

The vast majority of vaccines have been “reserved” by wealthy nations,

Where does responsibility lie for making the distribution more

We don’t have a world government, so we are a world of sovereign nations

The pharmaceutical companies can play a role, of course, in terms of

How did your family first come to live in Australia?

My parents were both living in Vienna in the nineteen-thirties. They were

Of my four grandparents, one, my mother’s mother, survived the

Did your family history influence your views of ethics?

it’s easier to empathize with the suffering that’s being inflicted on

In a book about your maternal grandfather, “Pushing Time Away,” you

I originally was interested in learning more about my grandfather, because

revolution is too difficult to achieve, and rather we should focus on getting

It seems like one of your least “instructive” books, in terms of how to

It seems to me that the movement that has grown up around your

expected, for capitalism to almost be incorporated into your

I don’t think capitalism is incorporated into my philosophical work. I think

Look, I think it would be better if you had an economic system in which

profitability. That makes perfect sense. So I don’t think we should be

If you’re asking me, “Would it be a better system if no C.E.O. would want

And that aspect of the culture, in this case, is self-interest?

Yeah, and a belief in market competitiveness, I guess. And an assessment

Alex Ezeh, a demographer of Nigerian origin at Drexel University. I

There’s certainly an underrepresentation of philosophers of African or

I think it’s a worthwhile question, because there are moments in your

thinking, for example, of Amartya Sen as an economist who uses

I probably have stayed out of discussions of race relations in America

I don’t think you should find it surprising, given that I’m a

I don’t want to shut it down. I started the Journal of Controversial Ideas

Does that mean that your version of consequentialism requires a certain

I think it’s wrong to discriminate against disabled people in employment

Harriet McBryde Johnson, the disability-rights lawyer who debated you

The bias that you described—the assumption that a person with a

Did she change your mind in some way?

Maybe a bit. Maybe a bit.

Tell me about the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

This is a response to what I feel is a worrying trend of restricting freedom

Are those papers in opposition to one another?

Yes, they are. We have another interesting paper called “Cognitive

coma as an alternative to long-term imprisonment. There’s a paper on the

Yes, that one is.

My perception is that there are times when freedom-of-speech

The journal is particularly aimed at protecting junior academics who don’t

The initial invitation in Germany came from a conference of disability

I think universities need to be a place for free discussion of ideas. Other

An example comes to mind. Someone might argue for a transphobic law

In the actual debate, it’s not only harm to trans people—gender-critical

But I didn’t say anything about not allowing a person to speak—merely

I wish it weren’t a free-speech debate—I wish it were only a debate about

As we talk about this, I’m thinking about “Animal Liberation.” You

No, I think offering a platform for reasoned argument is not participating

That is quite possible—that an individual argument might cause more

What do you think is the role of accountability in this enterprise?