re genocide is caused by theism evidence to benedikt roseneau in article qv at fb horus ap mchp sni de frank d s uucp frank o dwyer writes the information of that is invariant under your child being a son or a daughter and singing about santa claus wasn t your argument that there has to be more more than what more than we assume which is what exactly a most of the people i debate disagree with my premises hardly debate otherwise your favorite point that we sense so it hs to be there has been challenged more than once when i did it you said good question and did not address it i ve addressed it your caricature is not my favourite point needless to say at length in a previous outing and am currently discussing it with eric rescorla b there s little point in responding the same points everywhere i do my best to give everyone the courtesy of a reply you still repeat that point i do curious since i believe that was the first time i ve ever made it not that repetition would imply much more than your seeming inability to understand you ask me the same question i ll give you the same answer especially when in this case i know the answer to be true i do my best to give everyone the courtesy of a reply but if everyone is making the same points and i m pushed for time then i try to respond what i believe are the strongest formulations of those points if that doesn t include your post tough this is usenet and life is tough all over c since there s a great deal of responses this isn t always feasible i do my best to honestly answer questions put to me you drop out of debates with some posters and continue with others you appear with the same issue every n months and start the dicussion at the beginning again i ve only debated this issue twice in a a and occasionally in t a the first was in response to simon clippingdale s positive assertion that disagreement about moral values inexorably acknowledges that morals are relative it doesn t now simon has dropped out of the debate for some time i take that to mean that he is either busy or bored with the topic i certainly do not accuse him of dishonesty do you d i can t always understand what you say neither can t i understand you all the time usually one asks what the other side means usually one does usually you re clear but sometimes you aren t and i ask you what you mean other times you seem to get extremely uptight and i feel that i m debating against line noise sometimes i get tired and sometimes i have other things i d rather do again this is usenet and life is tough all over you re going to have to deal with it e you re starting to get personally insulting i may not even put your name in the hat in future that s supposed to be a threat no that s a simple statement and an assertion that i am not answerable to those who offer me baseless insults for example those who accuse me of lying about my personal beliefs while also complaining that i don t answer their questions like that you what you sense is evidence for the sensed to be there if only everything would be so easy what almost everyone senses is evidence for the sensed to be there because to all intents and purposes it is there we had that argument for one your claim that everyone senses it is not founded and you have been asked to give evidence for it often and then the correct statement would be it is reason to assume that it is there unless evidence against it has been found i have no problem with the second statement i have provided an argument that almost everyone senses that freedom is valuable the only cogent objection to this came from jon livesey and was offered by some other people too essentially that people disagree about fuzzy concepts such as freedom it s a good point and i m thinking about it your trick is to say i feel a is not right and so do many i know therefore a is absolutely right it neglects the possibility that these people consider a to be right as an effect of the same process restricting the claim of its absoluteness to those who have been subject of that process in other words refutes it you make the ontological claim you have to prove it nonsense my trick is to say i feel that a is better than b and so does almost any disinterested person i ask best evidence is therefore that a really is better than b subject to the assumption that we can establish to our mutual satisfaction what we mean by a and b and that the resulting system of values is self consistent now get this really is better is an idealisation a fictional model in the same sense that real material existence is a fictional model it may or may not correspond to something true it is nonetheless a useful assumption far more useful than the equally assumed relativist trick to wit i feel that a is better than b and so does almost any disinterested person i ask however if even one person disagrees that a is better than b or if even one person dissents from mutually agreed definitions of a and b then it is the case that b is better than a for that person and nothing more can be said i say this is useless because it inexorably implies that a supermajority seeking to maximise a cannot morally take action against someone seeking to maximise b e g a terrorist to do that would be to claim that a supermajority s carefully considered morality would be better than the terrorist s which would of course be true but a no no for an ethical relativist to claim that ethical relativism implies anything else is simply weasel words and an example of compartmentalisation to rival anything in the world of religion for a similar argument i sense morality is subjective it does not hurt me to do things that are considered to be objectively wrong by others if you mean that you do things that some others consider objectively wrong and it turns out not to be the case for you of course this is possible it is neither evidence for subjectivism nor evidence against objectivism except sometimes in a pragmatic sense it serves as a counterexample for that everything that is subject to judgements is absolute and as long as you don t provide evidence for that there is something universally agreed upon there is no reason to believe your hypothesis i ve done this freedom with the proviso that i still have to answer jon s objection that fuzzy concepts like freedom have no objective meaning further in order to make morality absolute universal or objective you would have to show that it is independent of humans or the attributes above look quite misleading not really what evidence is there that anything exists independently of humans you ll be hard pressed to find any that isn t logically equivalent when applied to values an analogous set of premises would be premise some people believe that objectively speaking the shortest route from my house to a bar is through the main entrance of the estate and down the malahide road premise i checked it out and found that the shortest route from my which is much closer you would never deduce from these that there is no shortest route from my house to a bar yet that is seemingly how you derive your relativist claim using premises which are logically no different no morals are a matter of belief so far the people still believe that the shortest way is through the main entrance no agreement on belief here and in order to have an analogy you would have to show that there is a shortest way and that there is a method to convince everyone of that it is the shortest way indeed in other words your analogy works only when one assumes that your premises are right in the first place if not it is a fallacy and if this were an argument for objectivism you d be right it isn t though it s a demonstration that the argument you gave me is neither argument against objectivism nor argument for relativism your gimmick is to assume in the first place that values aren t real and to use this to prove that values aren t real in other words you beg the question against me frank o dwyer i m not hatching that odwyer sse ie from hens by evelyn conlon
