Peter Singer

Timeline

1. 1946–1975

   Oxford and Animal Liberation

   Born in Melbourne in 1946, he earns a bachelor's degree at the University of Melbourne in 1967 and a Bachelor of Philosophy at Oxford in 1971, with a thesis on civil disobedience supervised by R. M. Hare. A 1970 lunch at Oxford with fellow graduate student Richard Keshen turns his attention to factory farming. His essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" follows in 1972, and Animal Liberation appears in 1975.

2. 1977–1999

   Bioethics at Monash

   In 1977, he returns to Melbourne, where he spends most of his career until 1999. He twice chairs the philosophy department at Monash University and founds its Centre for Human Bioethics, and his book Practical Ethics appears in 1979.

3. 1999–2024

   Professor at Princeton

   He moves to Princeton in 1999 and spends 25 years as Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values. His 2009 book The Life You Can Save gives its name to the nonprofit he founds to improve the lives of people in extreme poverty. He retires from Princeton in 2024.

4. July 2020

   On the Lex Fridman Podcast

   In July 2020, he appears on episode 107 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, titled "Suffering in Humans, Animals, and AI". The conversation covers whether robots can suffer and the control problem of AI.

5. 2021

   The Berggruen Prize

   He wins the 2021 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture, a $1 million award, for work reinvigorating utilitarianism in academic philosophy and as a force for change in the world. He donates the prize money to organizations that help people in extreme poverty and reduce the suffering of animals in factory farms.

6. 2022

   Speciesist bias in AI

   In February 2022, he coauthors "Speciesist bias in AI" with Thilo Hagendorff, Leonie Bossert and Yip Fai Tse; the paper finds speciesist patterns in image recognition systems, large language models and recommender systems. With Tse, he publishes "AI ethics: the case for including animals" in AI and Ethics in 2022, calling for a new field of research on how AI affects nonhuman animals.

7. 2024

   Animal-friendly AI and PSai

   In March 2024, he coauthors "The Case for Animal-Friendly AI" with Sankalpa Ghose, Yip Fai Tse, Kasra Rasaee and Jeff Sebo; the paper tests OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 and Anthropic's Claude 2.1 on the consideration they give to animals. In July 2024, he introduces Peter Singer AI, a chatbot he builds with Ghose from his writings that uses the Socratic method. Satisfied with its performance, he gives Ghose the go-ahead to make it public.

8. As of October 2026

   Visiting professor in Singapore

   After retiring from Princeton in 2024, he returns to live in Melbourne. He serves as V.K. Rajah Visiting Professor in Medical Ethics at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore, and co-hosts the podcast Lives Well Lived with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek.