The internationally renowned Australian philosopher Peter Albert David Singer (born 1946) is best known for his book Animal Liberation. However, he also made important contributions in theoretical ethics and in other areas of applied ethics.

Peter Albert David Singer was born on July 6, 1946, in Melbourne, Australia. His parents, Cora and Ernest Singer, had arrived in Australia eight years earlier, fleeing from their native Vienna to escape the persecution of Jews shortly after the Anschluss, the political union of Austria and Germany. By the time Peter was born, his father had become a successful importer of tea and coffee and his mother, already a qualified medical practitioner in Vienna, had cleared all the restrictive barriers then placed in the path of overseas doctors and was once again able to practice her chosen profession.

Keen to integrate their children into Australian society, Cora and Ernest Singer--neither of them religious believers--had decided...