I Am Not Finished Ranting About Peter Singer

[unspeakablehorror]

I am frustrated immensely by how much energy it would take to fully detail my issues with Singer and his book, but to summarize:

* Talks about movements (primarily civil rights and feminism) that he has no little to no understanding of.  Uses these movements only as flat ideological props to talk about animal 'liberation', which despite the time he spends detailing very specific information on this topic, he also demonstrates nearly no ideological understanding of. Seems to be of the misapprehension that civil rights and feminist movements achieved their goals and don't have any significant struggles to face in the modern day, which has never at any time during the existence of this book been true.

* Is absolutely insultingly awful about disabled people.  Just straight-up eugenics-level terrible here.

* Immense intellectual cowardice which takes the form of frequent 'both-sidesism'. 'Both sides make strong points...' Oh really? But what is your position on the issue? Guess you...don't really...have one.

* The pretension of intellectualism being opposite emotion. To me, it is worse to not acknowledge that people are fundamentally motivated by emotion than it is to believe one can be shown to be less biased by not expressing it or expressing it by more formal means. Knowledge by itself is meaningless without the existence of wants or desires. This includes the desire for knowledge for its own sake, but in a book that purports to be about activism and not just knowledge for its own sake, this is an especially egregrious issue.

* A philosopher spending so little time on actual philosophy.

* The part where he does his own special version of 'oh, those preachy vegans' in a book called Animal Liberation referencing the work of animal rights activists.

I feel like I'm forgetting some things here, but yeah, those are some of the big ones.