Peter Singer

by Jonathan Latham, PhD In 1381, for the first and only time, the dreaded Tower of London was captured from the King of England. The forces that seized it did not belong to a foreign ...

Have you noticed that, when it comes to venturing into questions of “right” and “wrong,” recent U.S. presidents lapse awkwardly and uncomfortably into a kindergarten-level of discourse? Obama: “We tortured some folks… that was wrong”–but then, after all, the torturer-criminals were doing a “tough job” and had “good” intentions! Obama often hastily drops such moral considerations, a realm of discourse and reasoning in which he is plainly uncomfortable and noticeably vague.

Once upon a time—in 1973, to be precise—Peter Singer suggested birth control for free-living animals as part of the “animal liberation” philosophy. Parenthetically at first. Publicly asked whether gazelles should be protected from lions, Singer replied in a letter for the New York Review of Books: