Professor Peter Singer

Recent Speaker

Ethicist and Author

February 11, 2009

"A Moral Challenge for our Time: The Lives We Can Save"

Professor Singer will focus on what he sees as one of the great moral wrongs of our time: the continuation of widespread extreme poverty in a world that also has so much affluence.  All of us in the middle class and above in affluent nations such as Australia - are responsible for failing to prevent this.  According to UNESCO, nearly 27,000 children are dying every day from poverty-related causes.  The problem is not insoluble, nor is it beyond our resources, and none of the excuses for inaction stands up to scrutiny.

Peter Singer was born in Melbourne in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. He has been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University since 1999, a position that since 2005 he has combined with an appointment as Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, attached to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. An internationally renowned philosopher and acclaimed author, Peter Singer was also the founding president of Animals Australia, which represents over thirty organisations working to reduce the suffering of animals. His recent book The Ethics of What We Eat, co-authored with Jim Mason, was a 2006 bestseller, and he will release a book about what we should be doing for the world's poor, The Life You Can Save, in February 2009.