Peter Singer

Animal Liberation

Singer published ‘Animal Liberation’, an essay in The New York Review of Books that resonated widely. It laid the groundwork for his seminal book of the same name, which popularized a moral principle that has hardly lost its edge: that it is not intellect or language that grants moral standing, but the capacity to suffer. With unflinching precision, Singer described the lives of animals in laboratories and factory farms. His ideas filtered into legislation, education, and consumer behavior, laying the foundation for the modern animal rights movement.