Introduction

Peter Singer has been an important part of my life since roughly I was 10 years old and he first hit the public imagination with his book Animal Liberation. He is the philosopher who put ethics and how we should live and what matters to us as human beings back into philosophy at a time when that sort of question wasn't really a prestigious approach for academic philosophers. His arguments and his relentless digging into how we treat animals for our comfort, for our taste buds, for our convenience really has changed the zeitgeist in many ways. We're far off from a world in which animal suffering is globally acknowledged as something we need to do something about but he really started a movement.