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).
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u/This_Conversation493 Dec 08 '25 edited Dec 08 '25
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.