- Lived:
- Born 6 July 1946, Melbourne, Australia; taught at Monash and Princeton; now emeritus and very much still arguing
- Tradition:
- Utilitarian applied ethics — animal liberation, global poverty, bioethics, effective altruism
- The Big Idea:
- Ethics is not about who you are but about what beings can feel and what you can do for them: if you can prevent something terrible at little cost to yourself, you must — whether the sufferer is a drowning child, a distant stranger, or a chicken.
- In their words:
- "If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it."
- If you remember one thing:
- He took utilitarianism out of the seminar room and aimed it at your dinner plate and your bank account — and millions of people changed how they eat and give because of it.