351 | Peter Singer on Maximizing Good for All Sentient Creatures
4/20/20261 hr 16 min
Peter Singer has been an influential philosopher for a number of decades. He was a significant early voice in animal rights, has been a leading thinker of utilitarianism, and helped inspire the effective altruism movement. In this podcast episode, we try our best to talk about all of those things -- working from metaethical questions of consequentialism vs. other approaches, to specific flavors of utilitarianism, the practical demands that ethics places on people, the rights of animals, and the decisions we make at the end of our lives.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/04/20/351-peter-singer-on-maximizing-good-for-all-sentient-creatures/
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Peter Singer received his B.Phil. in philosophy from the University of Oxford. He retired from Princeton University in 2023, and now lives in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of a number of influential books, including Animal Liberation (1975). He has been named a Companion of the order of Australia, and is a winner of the Berggruen Prize. He is the founder of the charity The Life You Can Save. He and philosopher Kasia de Lazari Radek are co-hosts of the Lives Well Lived podcast.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Sean Carroll· Host1:01
[ding] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We all in life struggle with the question of what is the right thing to do? How do you behave like a good person? What is the moral thing to do, the ethical thing to do? Once you get into the professional philosophy sphere, you start asking, what do you mean by the right thing to do? Is there something called the right thing to do? Is that an objective truth about the universe?