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Today over 1.4 billion people live in poverty. Climate change threatens rich and poor nations alike, yet consensus on a way forward remains elusive.

Globalisation remains an ethical quagmire, and free trade is usually anything but. War and famine continue to plague the planet. Large scale agriculture is poisoning people and the environment.

Ethical philosopher, and long time political activist, Peter Singer urges those of us in the affluent world to assume personal responsibility for the poor, for dying children, for animals and for the planet.

In this session Sean Plunket asks Singer and financial journalist/social commentator Rod Oram what it means here in New Zealand - a country committed to agriculture, the exchange rate and owning a bit of God's Own. This session asks how we as a global community can create our future, and how we might do that responsibly.

Peter Singer's 'Animal Liberation' was first published in 1975 and immediately became the founding philosophical manifesto of the animal liberation movement.

Listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Singer is one of the world's foremost thinkers on ethics and a professor of philosophy at the University of Princeton. His utilitarian standpoint and long career specialising in the field of applied ethics means that he is no stranger to controversy, having written and argued about the ethics of food, globalisation, George W. Bush (with whom he shares a birthday) and secularism.

His most recent book, 'The Life You Can Save', is once again a work of practical ethics urging its readers to engage with the problems of poverty and to ask themselves "What should I be doing to help?"

Join this radical thinker in conversation with Keith Ovenden.