A pile of dollar bills. At 80, Peter Singer is still pressing the wealthy to treat money as a tool for reducing preventable suffering.
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It has never been harder to defend the billionaires, partly because there have never been this much of them to defend.
Consider a worker who started earning $1,000 an hour in the year zero and never stopped, no sleep, no holidays, no maternity leave or World Cup watch parties for the entirety of two millennia. By this morning she would have amassed roughly $17.8 billion, a fortune that would place her comfortably among the world’s five hundred richest people but nowhere near its richest one. After SpaceX’s June IPO pushed Elon Musk’s net worth past $1.3 trillion, our tireless worker would still be more than $1.28 trillion short, holding about 1.4 percent of the total hoard.
Oxfam greeted the milestone by declaring a new pinnacle of oligarchy and a dark day for democracy, and the slogan that there are no ethical billionaires has completed its migration from protest placard to something close to conventional wisdom.
Which makes it worth noting that the philosopher who has spent five decades telling those already comfortable to give until it genuinely costs them turns 80 this week, and he thinks the slogan is wrong.
The verdict from the man who should agree
If anyone on earth has earned the right to condemn the billionaire class, it is Peter Singer.
His 1972 paper Famine, Affluence and Morality argued that letting a child drown in a shallow pond to keep your shoes dry is morally indistinguishable from declining to donate while children die of preventable disease, and the argument has been ruining dinner parties ever since. His next books, Animal Liberation, launched a movement in 1975 and The Life You Can Save built the case that affluence carries obligations most of us prefer to ignore. When I asked him, days before his 80th birthday, whether there are ethical billionaires, the great scold of Western comfort had every incentive to say no.
“I think that’s false. I think that’s definitely false,” Peter Singer told me.
His exhibit A is Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook co-founder who later started Asana, and his wife Cari Tuna, who together built Good Ventures to give their fortune away as effectively as research allows. “You could just say, “to be a billionaire is evil, so I’m going to give away the seven billion that I have in the next few months.” But then you also will have foregone the opportunity to really find out what is the best thing you could have done with that immense amount of money,” Singer said, “and so you would almost certainly be doing less good than you will be able to do if you take all the time you need to find out how best to give it away.”
The distinction he draws is the one the slogan collapses. Whether an individual holding a billion dollars can act ethically and whether a world that produces billionaires is the best world available are two entirely different questions, and Singer answers yes to the first while leaving the second wide open for us to determine, by thinking about the consequences, in a world divided into sovereign countries, of a wealthy country enacting a tax system or other institutional barriers to prevent anyone from ever acquiring a billion dollars. A billionaire can act ethically, Singer implies, but only if the fortune becomes a responsibility rather than a monument.
Many heard the call.
The Effective Altruism movement took Singer’s moral arithmetic and turned it into a wavefront of donors, researchers, founders, students, engineers, and true believers who tried to make generosity less sentimental and more accountable. GiveWell, one of the movement’s central institutions, says it raised $415 million in 2024 from more than 30,000 donors and directed $397 million to cost-effective programs across 22 countries. The tenets of the movement are simple enough. Give where the evidence says the money will do the most good. Earn more, if earning more allows you to give more. Treat philanthropy not as absolution, but as optimization under moral pressure.
For a time, it gave the age of extreme wealth its most intellectually serious defense, and also one of its most dangerous temptations.
The sideways steps of moral ambition
Sam Bankman-Fried became the movement’s most spectacular counterexample, arriving as effective altruism’s favorite son, a crypto billionaire who pledged to earn enormously in order to give enormously, and departing in 2024 with a 25-year sentence for defrauding FTX customers of billions.
The episode is often cited as proof that the whole project of ethical wealth was naive, though the more precise reading is that moral movements produce frauds the way quality goods produce copycats. Singer’s own view is that Bankman-Fried was an incompetent company manager, rather than a deliberate fraudster, and he points out that FTX’s creditors have now been paid the full dollar value of their holdings on the day the exchange went bankrupt. But even if Bankman-Fried was a fraudster, the existence of a counterfeit tells you the currency was worth forging.
Effective altruism has learned from its sideways steps since then, chastened by its own blind spots and still moving forward. At tabloid scale, the episode replayed in miniature the same argument human beings have been having for centuries over what it means to do good, how much certainty anyone should trust, and whose suffering counts when the benefits and costs are spread across the world.
The endeavor of moral philosophy, unlike physics, has never been a clean hunt for laws of nature waiting to be discovered. It has been the more unruly project of pulling human nature into rules we can actually live by, and for one long tradition the organizing target has been the maximal good, the greatest wellbeing for the greatest number, with utility as its unit of account.
Singer stands squarely in that tradition, and his utilitarianism explains both his moral severity and his tactical flexibility. “If you start asking people to be saints, they’re going to throw up their hands and turn away,” Singer said, explaining why The Life You Can Save, the nonprofit he founded, asks modest earners for 1 percent of income rather than the give-until-it-hurts maximum his 1972 paper implied.
Morality is not a fight one wins by scolding people into purity, particularly those who hold more wealth than entire nations. It moves when the circle of obligation expands, when more lives are allowed to count, and when enough people can be brought along before they are asked to become saints.
The circles keep expanding
The through line of Singer’s career, and the reason his birthday deserves more than a candle, is the idea of the expanding circle.
The lineage runs back to Jeremy Bentham, who in the late eighteenth century proposed that pleasure and pain could be counted and that the question about animals was never whether they can reason or talk but whether they can suffer. Ever since, the moral calculus has swelled to admit new entrants, other tribes, other nations, other religions, women, the enslaved, the colonized, and eventually other species, each addition contested at the time and obvious in retrospect. The work remains unfinished, and as any student of the twentieth century knows, it can be undone with astonishing speed.
Yet the direction of travel is hard to miss once you look for it.
Effective altruism, the discipline of asking where a marginal dollar produces the most measurable good, grew from a seminar-room argument into a movement that has directed billions toward malaria nets and deworming. Rutger Bregman’s School for Moral Ambition now recruits high performers to treat doing good as a career rather than a weekend hobby.
Singer points to plainer evidence still. Vegan options sit in every supermarket when the word itself was unknown in 1975, and medically assisted dying, legal nowhere on earth when he began writing about it, is now law in more than a dozen American jurisdictions and in countries as culturally Catholic as Spain and Portugal.
“I’m very pleased to say that the mainstream seems to be coming a little closer to me, because I used to be regarded as a far-out radical,” Singer said.
The pull is generational too. “I gave a couple of talks in Seoul, South Korea, and I got tremendous audiences there, and they were very engaged in trying to think about ethics, including people who were not philosophy students at all,” Singer told me, noting that Korean students encounter his work in high school.
While part of the public debate remains stuck on whether billionaires can ever be ethical, a growing number of people are asking the more immediate question of how to become ethical regular people.
This is where Singer’s work now meets the moral ambition movement around Rutger Bregman and the School for Moral Ambition, whose pitch is less monkish renunciation than professional redirection. The aim is not to shame people for having climbed, but to ask what the climb was for.
“We encounter many people who spent years climbing the ladder, only to discover it was leaning against the wrong wall,” says Julia van Boven, head of Profit for Good, a spinoff from the School for Moral Ambition. “We invite them to join a community of people who walk a different path and take on problems that feel too daunting to take on alone.”
That is the bridge from Singer’s moral philosophy to Bregman’s moral ambition. At a time when high-status careers can make talent feel both richly rewarded and morally underused, moral ambition turns the old self-help question inside out. The question is no longer only how to build the life you want, but what your life might do if you aimed it at the problems that matter.
Singer’s own answer has become increasingly action oriented.
The pivot to action at 80
Singer marks the birthday with a rebalancing rather than a retirement.
After transferring to emeritus status at Princeton in 2024, he has co-founded Profit for Good with Julia van Boven of the School for Moral Ambition, a movement asking businesses to commit at least 10 percent of profits to effective causes.
The maximal case already exists in Humanitix, a ticketing company that directs 100 percent of its profits to charity, so that booking fees become funding for children in need in low-income countries, and other high-impact causes. A formal launch conference is planned for June 2027, building on a gathering that drew a couple of hundred entrepreneurs last summer.
“I’m less likely to make major philosophical breakthroughs that will make a difference, but I can still use the capital that I’ve built up over my career to have a positive influence for good,” Singer told me.
In his next decade, Singer is asking more of us to move from agreement to action, and more companies to treat profit as a tool that can be pointed toward the world’s most preventable suffering. If the world is going to keep producing billionaires, Singer’s answer is to make more of them unable to live comfortably with the knowledge of how much suffering their money could have prevented. The point is to carry moral philosophy farther than the seminar room, into payrolls, boardrooms, cap tables, product margins, and the choices ordinary professionals make before they have talked themselves out of responsibility.
That is where Singer’s late-career project meets Bregman’s moral ambition movement. The shared bet is that founders and professionals do not need less ambition. They need ambition with a larger object, one that asks not only how much they can build, but how much good the thing they build can be made to do.
For Profit for Good, that means moving moral ambition into the architecture of the company itself. “We want to change the definition of success,” says van Boven. “Profit for Good invites founders to use their skills, capital, network and reputation, not just for their business, but to improve the world we share.”
The takeaway is clear. We shouldn’t ask founders to become less serious about building wealth. Instead, we should ask them to become more serious about what all that building is ultimately for. And for the rest of us, there is the homework Singer has assigned.
Ask Singer for the great unsolved problem of his field and he reaches for Derek Parfit’s Theory X. Would a world of eight billion people leading rich, splendid lives be better than a world of eight trillion whose lives are barely worth living, even if their wellbeing sums to more in total? Parfit spent a lifetime searching for a coherent theory that could answer the question without collapsing into absurdity, and he died without finding it.
Nobody has.
The stakes are not abstract either, since the answer bears on population policy, on how we weigh future generations, and even on whether farming animals with genuinely good lives could ever be justified.
Singer turns 80 with the problem still young.