The Interview Podcast: Peter Singer

I believe that most of us, in our own humble ways, try to make the world better.Maybe that means giving what we can to charity or helping out in our community.

Maybe it means eating less meat or driving less often.It’s enough for each of us to do our own little part.Not so, says Peter Singer.

Singer, who is 78 and recently retired from a long teaching career at Princeton, is perhaps the world’s most influential living philosopher.His unstinting work grows out of utilitarianism, which is the view that we should do as much as possible to bring about the greatest circumstance for every individual being — and “being” does not necessarily mean “human.” His 1975 book, “Animal Liberation,” a broadside against factory farming and a defense of animal rights, helped galvanize a movement toward vegan and vegetarian eating.

(Singer’s new book, “Consider the Turkey,” is a polemic against the enormous animal suffering that goes into the traditional Thanksgiving turkey feast.) And his writing on what the relatively affluent owe to the poor — short version: a lot more — was an important building block for the data-driven philanthropic movement known as effective altruism, which became popular with high-profile Silicon Valley figures including the disgraced cryptocurrency magnate Sam Bankman-Fried.(As well as plenty of regular people looking to do more good, more efficiently.)Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppBut Singer is as controversial as he is influential.

Not so much for his attempts to disrupt complacent common-sense ethical beliefs — that, for example, we’re justified in prioritizing the welfare of those close to us over that of strangers far away — but more for his arguments in support of things like allowing parents to pursue euthanasia for severely disabled infants.It’s those ideas that have led Singer to being called dangerous, a eugenicist and worse.

None of which seems to matter much ...