Peter Singer Wants to Save Animals… and Humans, Too

Fail Better with David Duchovny

Grace Cohen-Chen

Society & Culture

4.6 • 534 Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Peter Singer has a pretty simple mission: minimize the suffering of all living creatures. But a seemingly straightforward objective can lead to some surprisingly thorny questions. As a philosopher and professor, he’s spent decades pondering the ethical dilemmas that come with living in the modern world. His books have ignited movements — from animal rights to wealth equality — but his deeply personal work, confronting family, legacy, and inherited pain, also resonates. I’ve admired Peter’s work for years (it’s a huge part of why I stopped eating meat in college) and I was honored to sit down with such a brilliant thinker. Follow me on Instagram at @davidduchovny. Stay up to date with Lemonada on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia. Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our shows and get bonus content. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and every other Lemonada show, go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's morning in New York.
0:02.8	Oh, God.
0:06.2	Hey, everybody.
0:07.3	I'm Mandy Patinkin.
0:08.7	And I'm Catherine Grady.
0:09.8	And we have a new podcast.
0:11.7	It's called Don't Listen to Us.
0:14.1	Many of you've asked for our advice.
0:16.1	Tell me, what is wrong with you people?
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0:20.3	Our Take It or Leave a Adv Device show every Wednesday, out now.
0:24.7	A Lemonada Media Original.
0:36.1	I'm David Duggany, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are.
0:43.0	Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher.
0:45.3	Right up until he retired last year, he'd been working as a professor for decades, including a long tenure at Princeton University, my alma mater.
0:52.7	So I feel a special connection to him.
0:55.4	Peter's philosophy focuses on ethics and what's called the utilitarian perspective.
1:00.0	Another big area of Peter's work is the suffering of animals, very important to me as well.
1:05.0	His book, Animal Liberation, is a cornerstone of modern thinking about animal abuse and
1:09.4	vegetarianism, as it was for me.
1:12.4	Peter has a pretty big reach for a modern philosopher, a profession that can feel frozen in
1:16.9	time, you know, like BC time, reserved for people like Socrates. And Peter definitely shows that he
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