Unsanctifying Human Life offers a collection of Singer's best and most challenging articles from 1971 to the present. The book includes early critiques of various approaches to philosophy and the role of philosophers, followed by controversial works on the moral status of animals, infanticide, euthanasia, the allocation of scarce health care resources, embryo experimentation, environmental responsibility, and reflections on how we should live.

Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. He is the author of Animal Liberation, first published in 1975, and is widely credited with triggering the modern animal rights movement. His Practical Ethics is one of the most widely used texts in applied ethics, and Rethinking Life and Death received the 1995 Australian National Book Council's Banjo Award for non-fiction. He is the editor of A Companion to Ethics (Blackwell 1991) and was the foundation president of the International Association of Bioethics.

Helga Kuhse is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Monash University and Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Caring (Blackwell 1997); Willing to Listen – Wanting to Die (1995); Individuals, Humans, and Persons (with Peter Singer, 1994); The Sanctity-of-Life Doctrine in Medicine (1987); and Should the Baby Live? (with Peter Singer, 1985). She is also co-editor, with Peter Singer, of A Companion to Bioethics and Bioethics: An Anthology, both published by Blackwell.