My guest today, Peter Singer, is arguably the most influential living philosopher.

His thinking is at a profound impact on how the world views morality, animal rights and

philanthropy.

I enjoy arguing, and so I could have been a lawyer, but I think I found a field in which I

can argue much more broadly about a wide range of topics, and I do think that I've had

an impact on people.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire, with Steve Levitt.

Peter Singer knows how to get people to take action.

I personally know at least a dozen people who became vegetarian after the Red Is Book

Animal Liberation, and the effect of altruism movement is in large part the consequence

of his early writings on the topic.

I've read a lot of what he's written, and what I find most striking is that everything

he argues is based on just a few simple assumptions about the world.

So my first goal today is to get him to lay out those assumptions.

Maybe I can offer a few challenges to those assumptions, although I doubt he'll find

my arguments very persuasive, and then have him talk through how he gets from these simple

premises to often counterintuitive, strikingly original conclusions.

It's always interesting for me to meet people for the first time when I've been hearing

about them and reading their work for 20-something years, because how they talk and how they

write Sonato is so similar.

Great to meet you too.

In 2000, you laid out the three moral premises that underlie your thinking.

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