On this day in vegan history · July 6, 1946
Peter Singer Is Born in Melbourne
A baby born to refugee parents in Melbourne would grow up to write the book that gave the animal rights movement its argument.
The facts
- Born
- 6 July 1946, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Parents
- Austrian Jewish refugees who fled Vienna after the 1938 Anschluss
- Education
- University of Melbourne, then a B.Phil. at Oxford under R. M. Hare
- Defining book
- Animal Liberation, published 1975
Peter Albert David Singer was born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, on 6 July 1946. His parents were Austrian Jews who had fled Vienna for Australia after the Anschluss brought Nazi Germany into Austria in 1938. He studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne and then at Oxford, where he sharpened the utilitarian reasoning that would later underpin his most consequential book. Nearly thirty years after his birth, that reasoning became Animal Liberation, published in 1975, which applied the idea of equal consideration of interests to animals and gave the modern movement against factory farming and animal testing its philosophical case.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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Published in 1975, Animal Liberation has been cited as a formative influence on leaders of the modern animal liberation movement.
Wikipedia, "Peter Singer"
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Singer's utilitarian case for taking animal suffering seriously moved animal advocacy out of sentiment and into an argument philosophers and lawmakers had to answer, a case the movement is still building on today.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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