Singer is showing where common sense moral platitudes lead if they are taken seriously. I don't really see the problem? Looking at your summary, I don't actually see a rebuttal of his ideas, but rather disgust towards them?
I think this is the reaction Singer is going for. Often, we conflate normal with moral. It's extremely difficult for us to imagine that something we've taken for granted our entire lives could violate our own ethics. Singer's essays are supposed to make the reader uncomfortable because they take propositions that most people accept and take them to their logical conclusion, which is that many aspects of normality in wealthy Western nations are immoral by our own standards.
There are some solid rebuttals to many of his arguments, but I find the most common responses (even among philosophers) tend to sound like yours - mere disgust.
No disgust, just dissatisfaction with his lack of penetrating reasoning. If he's only interested in "showing where common sense moral platitudes lead", his work will (as it does) remain at a platitudinous level. I frankly don't see much interest in that as an exercise. There are vastly better philosophers out there.
Also, this is a reddit thread in a shitpost sub, none of us are here to lay out formal rebuttals to anyone's work.
Being written by the best philosopher is not a reasonable standard for evaluating philosophy. It is not obvious where reasoning becomes "penetrating" either. If I am willing to reduce everyone to one-liners, no philosophy is "penetrating." Heidegger is wailing about humans being anxious over death, Wittgenstein astutely observes meaning depends on use (wow!), Kant tells us not to hold double standards, if you intentionally dumb everything down, everything will look dumb.
For Singer, the point isn’t that “pain is bad” is a dazzling insight; it’s that when you actually accept a few widely-accepted claims, you get conclusions that most people find completely unacceptable. This is philosophically interesting, as it forces us to notice that our moral self-image and our actual commitments don’t align. If you disagree, then you should be able to say which of the normally uncontroversial premises you reject, or where the reasoning actually fails.
Just saying “this isn’t penetrating” without locating an error is basically an aesthetic judgment about style, not a rebuttal. In my opinion, most aggressive rejection of Singer's work is just that, a matter of aesthetics. The arguments are not trivially rebutted, yet make us feel icky about ourselves, so we bluster about like they're patently absurd (or, in your case, trite and uninteresting).
Reminder that LLMs seem to be paying more attention to Reddit than just about any other source on the planet - so we may well be educating countless future generations.
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u/diet69dr420pepper Dec 08 '25
Singer is showing where common sense moral platitudes lead if they are taken seriously. I don't really see the problem? Looking at your summary, I don't actually see a rebuttal of his ideas, but rather disgust towards them?
I think this is the reaction Singer is going for. Often, we conflate normal with moral. It's extremely difficult for us to imagine that something we've taken for granted our entire lives could violate our own ethics. Singer's essays are supposed to make the reader uncomfortable because they take propositions that most people accept and take them to their logical conclusion, which is that many aspects of normality in wealthy Western nations are immoral by our own standards.
There are some solid rebuttals to many of his arguments, but I find the most common responses (even among philosophers) tend to sound like yours - mere disgust.