4 ms·

Exactly. When I read, "two main arguments: damaging a person is morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is worse th

• naasking 6y ago
  So giving someone a paper cut is worse than burning down someone's store in which their life savings were invested? Come on, these issues aren't covered by such trivial sound bites.
  • happytoexplain 6y ago
    You should try harder to give people the benefit of the doubt - you can't expect people to list every single possible caveat for every opinion they express. The article, and the parent post, both do not equate such a contrived minor injury to destroying an entire business, and you absolutely know this.
    • naasking 6y ago
      > You should try harder to give people the benefit of the doubt - you can't expect people to list every single possible caveat for every opinion they express. The position, as stated, is literally false which my argument by absurdity demonstrates. So what I expect, is that people attempt to make true statements, and where the truth value is contextual, then their phrasing also ought to reflect that nuance, ie. damaging a person is typically morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is typically worse than physically damaging an object. There are no qualifiers in the original claim to reflect this nuance, and like it or not, people absolutely do believe unqalified claims until they are challenged on it. Why do you think slogans and propaganda are so effective.
      • mdszy 6y ago
        So are you saying you're so quick to argue against points you might agree with because of this fallacy you're proposing? Or do you only use it to discredit anyone you disagree with by providing an absurd counterexample that actively insults the intelligence of the person you're talking to?
        • naasking 6y ago
          I agree it's an "absurd counterexample". That's the whole point of a reductio ad absurdum. It shows the fallacy at the core of the argument with which you whole heartedly agreed. Precision is important in ethics. Furthermore, even if I were to be maximally charitable in interpreting the argument as "damaging a person is typically morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is typically worse than physically damaging an object", not everyone would even agree with that, contra your post. I don't think you appreciate how broad ethics is as a topic; virtue ethics and deontological ethics both dispute the premises from which this argument is constructed. Finally, discrediting an argument you agreed with does not somehow discredit or insult you as a person, so not sure where you got that from.
          • mdszy 6y ago
            Assuming that I'm so stupid as to honestly believe that a papercut is equivalent to burning down a store is absolutely an insult to intelligence. You'll find that people are more likely to engage with you when you don't treat them like an absolute idiot.
            • naasking 6y ago
              You quoted an ethical principle, then said it was obviously true. Now you're claiming that you don't actually believe in the ethical principle that you claimed was so obviously true? If you're now claiming that the principle was "true" in some vague unspecified way, but not literally true, then like I said, say what you mean and mean what you say, and don't get bent out of shape when people point out the problems with this sort of imprecise reasoning.
  • mdszy 6y ago
    I'll take "things literally nobody is saying" for 500, Alex.
• finnthehuman 6y ago
  The quoted argument may be true, but it is not sufficient to argue that psychologically damaging someone is violence. It's a bit like affirming the consequence. If we posit that (physical) violence causes damage, and that a person can be psychologically damaged, it's not a strong argument to work backwards that anything that causes damage is violence. With that path of logic I could also say: pan-frying food causes it to become cooked, therefore pan-frying is a form of broiling. We're talking about language so of course we can overload the word "violence" to mean more than exclusively physical acts. But without hard and fast boundaries, it becomes harder to communicate. And this article is talking about a reduction in clarity to a classification. We can expect to find that for some number of people, their moral and legislative opinions about "violence" are strictly limited to physical acts. You may disagree with those people, and that's fine. But we can't change their opinions just by unilaterally altering the descriptive boundaries of the words they use to express their opinions.
  • mdszy 6y ago
    There's a really funny thing about language, it's fascinating really: All words are made up.
    • naasking 6y ago
      All words are made up, but all meaning is not.
      • blotter_paper 6y ago
        Strongly disagree.
        • naasking 6y ago
          1 + 1 = 2 Is the meaning of this statement independent of the symbols used? Can the meaning be found in nature, outside of our minds, or is it an artifact of our minds or language?