The Problem With Peter Singer

26 Jun, 2025

The Boy, the Book, the Burn

I was fifteen. Already queer, already aching. Already quoting The Smiths like scripture, letting Meat is Murder bleed out of my bedroom speakers like confession. I didn’t have the words for it then. The tangled ethics of desire and death, but I felt it. Every time I looked at Marino.

Marino was a straight boy with fingers that smelled like tobacco and tenderness, cheekbones sharp enough to wound, and a Greek-boy smirk that could quiet a room. He epitomised everything I wasn’t. Street-smart. Casually cruel. Forever generous. Carved from the kind of charisma that never grows old because it doesn’t live long enough to.

He never cared that I was gay. He was the only boy who knew in high school and didn’t shrink or sneer or weaponise it later behind a locker door. Even after I tried it on him, both of us stoned and drunk, sitting on the wrong side of a railway embankment, past midnight, the occasional red rattler clattering by like a warning we were too hard to heed, he didn’t flinch. Didn’t mock. He just looked at me, half-laughed, lit another smoke, and said, “You’re alright.” He loved me for me. And I loved him for him. Faults, fragilities, and all that ache he tried to bury beneath bravado. Of all of us, he was the one life clutched too tightly, too early, as if it knew he wouldn't stay. He died in his twenties. Fast life, fast end. The kind they don’t give elegies to. Just whispers.

It was Marino who first handed me a cassette of The Smiths, thumb smudged on the plastic, a cigarette tucked behind his ear like punctuation. “Listen,” he said. “It’ll change your life.” And it did. Morrissey moaned like a saint in crisis, and suddenly meat became murder, silence became sin, and I couldn’t unsee what I hadn’t yet dared to name. It cracked something open in me. Made me think. Made me ache. Made me walk to a second-hand bookstore two suburbs over just to find a dog-eared copy of Animal Liberation and carry it home like scripture.

Peter Singer didn’t write for comfort. He wrote like someone lighting a match in a room soaked in silence. A cool, clean blaze. No metaphor. No mercy. Just logic.

And for a kid who was falling in love with boys he couldn’t touch, grieving animals no one mourned, and slipping between identities like loose skin, that logic landed like a revelation. Not because it felt good. But because it made sense.

It demanded I think. Not feel. Not flinch. Not flounder in performative empathy. But reason. And it changed me. Completely.

Which is why I find it necessary, and deeply queer, if we’re honest, to defend the man whose moral mathematics has since become a battleground of betrayal. Yes. Peter Singer is controversial. Sometimes cold. Sometimes clunky. Often critiqued. And yet, beneath the easy outrage and the carnival of call-outs, there lies a challenge we are too cowardly or too comfortable to meet head-on.

Let’s talk about it.

The God of Utilitarianism Wears No Halo

To understand Singer is to walk barefoot across a floor littered with glass. He doesn’t cushion. He cuts.

He doesn’t believe in moral absolutes. He believes in outcomes. In utility. In less suffering, full stop. He strips away sentiment, tradition, even identity if needed, in the ruthless pursuit of the greater good. In a world that thrives on symbolic gestures and sacred cows, this makes him dangerous.

Take the most cited and searing critique. His views on disability.

In Practical Ethics and elsewhere, Singer argues that in cases of profound disability, especially neonatal, it may be ethically permissible to end a life if the suffering outweighs the joy it might contain. Not will contain. Might.

Cue fury. Cue pain. Cue those who have lived, loved, and fought for the dignity of disabled lives rightly calling out the existential threat of his calculus.

That pain is real. And words don’t fall on clean floors. They hit messy lives, hospital wards, bloodlines, bedtime stories. Some things are sacred. Some things should be.

But moral discomfort isn’t moral disproof.

Singer isn’t proposing eugenics. He isn’t seeking control. He’s seeking coherence. He’s asking hard questions most of us won’t even whisper aloud. When does suffering become a cage? When does existence become harm? When is mercy more ethical than hope?

These are questions I’ve carried too. Not in a lecture hall, but in foster homes. In funeral chapels. In psychiatric wards where children claw at invisible walls. I’ve seen lives where love isn’t enough. I’ve held hands that tremble in pain not because of who they are, but because no one ever asked if they wanted to be here.

Singer asks. He does not command. He offers reason, not rule. And that matters.

The Left’s Favourite Paradox: Praise the Book, Burn the Author

Here’s a heresy. Animal Liberation is the most influential book I’ve ever read. It cracked open my world like a pomegranate. Raw, red, and impossible to reseal.

Before that book, I thought compassion was enough. After it, I knew I had to live it.

And yet now, in the tangle of leftist orthodoxy and social media pyres, Peter Singer is persona non grata. His name smoulders under a thousand critiques. He’s ableist. He’s privileged. He lacks lived experience. He’s a philosopher with no poetry.

Many of those critiques are true. And still they don’t undo the logic.

Singer’s framework doesn’t flatter your feelings. It doesn’t ask how something sounds. It asks what it does. It doesn’t protect your ego. It protects sentient life. Whether that life is a rescued hen, a factory-farmed sow, a mosquito-netted child in Uganda.

If you cheer his arguments when they rescue animals from slaughter, you don’t get to discard him when those same arguments stretch into ethically thornier terrain.

We can’t demand moral consistency from our systems while rejecting it in our thinkers.

I’ve sat in activist circles where we toasted Animal Liberation one week and tore him apart the next. I’ve watched a generation raised on vegan virtue recoil when logic turned its lens back on human suffering. As if ethics should be comfortable, curated, and clean.

But ethics isn’t an aesthetic. It’s not soft lighting and gentle language. Sometimes it’s brutal. Sometimes it bruises. Sometimes it means saying yes to hard truths.

Singer doesn’t tell the story we want. He tells the one that holds up.

Queer Ethics: Or, Why I Defend a Man Who Would Never March in Mardi Gras

I’ve marched in Mardi Gras. Marched until my calves burned and my voice splintered and glitter settled in all the wrong places. I’ve kissed boys in protest and eulogised lovers in speeches. I know what it is to be political simply by being.

I don’t think Peter Singer would ever hold a placard that reads Love is Love. But I also don’t need him to.

What I need is a framework that includes us. That doesn’t rely on fashion or fervour. That stands whether we’re popular or pariahs.

Singer’s ethic of sentience doesn’t care who you kiss or whether you wear feathers at the march. It asks. Do you suffer? Can you flourish? Can harm be avoided? That is your worth.

And that is revolutionary.

Because the same logic that demands justice for animals requires justice for queers. The same calculation that protects a pig from pain also shields a child from conversion therapy. A trans teen from suicide. A gay elder from dying alone.

That’s the quiet power of logic. It does not love you back. But it won’t forget you either.

Stories vs Systems: The Politics of Feeling Good

We are living through a crisis of coherence. A time where stories seduce, but systems stall. Where 'your truth' takes precedence over 'the truth'. Where moral debate becomes a popularity contest.

Singer doesn’t play that game.

He speaks in syllogisms, not soundbites. He builds ethics from the ground up, not from the trending hashtags. That’s why he endures. That’s why he irritates. He refuses to perform his politics.

Yes. That has limits. Sometimes language needs poetry. Sometimes justice needs a story.

But if I had to choose between someone who feels right and someone who thinks right, I’ll take the thinker. Every time.

Because logic can be taught. Emotion can’t be measured. And when the machine keeps churning — breeding, branding, and butchering billions — I’ll follow the one with a plan and a purpose, not the prettiest protest sign.

The Boy, the Book, the Burn of Becoming

Sometimes I wonder what Marino would have said if I’d told him. About the book. About the tofu. About the ache I felt when I looked at a lamb’s eyes and thought you don’t want to die either.

He wouldn’t have said much. Marino didn’t do philosophy. He did moods, he did marijuana, he did the Dead Kennedys, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Butthole Surfers. He did loyalty like it was law. He once told our maths teacher, Mr Dunn, to fuck off when he thought they laughed at a kid with a limp. There was a code in him. Unspoken. Brutal. Strangely pure.

He would’ve hated Singer. Too many words. Not enough punch.

But maybe he would’ve understood the point. Maybe he would’ve seen it the way street kids sometimes see things. Not as abstract debates but as bets you make with yourself about who you’re willing to become.

I think that’s what Animal Liberation did for me. It dared me to become someone better than what the world expected. A boy who kissed other boys. Who lit candles for calves. Who read Kant and cried at kill floors. A contradiction in combat boots.

And Singer, cold, clinical, controversial, gave me permission. Not to feel more. To think more.

He said your grief matters. But so does theirs. He said your trauma is valid. But don’t build your ethics on it alone. He said comfort is not a compass.

And that mattered.

Because when grief took me, when I wept over piglets in crates and people in prison cells and a trans friend who didn’t survive the street, I needed more than feeling. I needed a way to stay upright. To do good that was good. Measurably. Defensibly. Ethically.

Singer gave me that.

I light incense sometimes when I write. I hate incense. But still occasionally I light it. Old habit. Reminds me of memorials. Of queer vigils. Of funerals for boys the world forgot. Sometimes I whisper Marino’s name when I strike the match. Sometimes I whisper Singer’s.

Not because they’re the same. But because both carved something in me. One with friendship. One with footnotes.

I owe them both.

And if that’s uncomfortable, good.

Some debts should chafe.

Kaelib Reece is a queer writer, activist, and animal liberationist living on Wurundjeri land. He writes at the intersection of grief, ethics, queerness, and protest. His work blends the ritual with the political, the memoir with the manifesto. Read more at kaelibreece.com.au.