My edited-in clarification should take care of your second point. As for your first point, I don’t know why you say something can’t be true or false just because it’s an opinion. If an opinion is a claim, then it is either true or false. And the opinion “You can criticize someone based on reasonable assumptions” is a claim. You’re not just telling me what tastes good to you. You’re making a claim about what is permissible.
I’ll put it this way: All knowledge involves reasonable assumptions, but not every reasonable assumption is (or even yields) knowledge. Meanwhile, legitimate moral criticism requires, not just reasonable assumptions, but the stricter standard of knowledge.
Whoops, my mistake, the new member of the club is actually mhendo, sorry for the lack of a welcome gift bag.
Yeh, I was banned for not being racist. So unfair!
No, because it involves balancing competing values.
By analogy, one could ask what the correct drinking age is. If the only goal of setting a drinking age is to minimize the number of drunk driving fatalities, then in principle the question has a correct answer. But there is also the principle that at a certain age, people should be allowed to make their own decision about purchasing and consuming alcohol.
Some people will put more value on individual autonomy; others will put more value on minimizing societal harm. There’s no correct answer to the question, at least not one that is precisely correct. At best there is a range of reasonable answers.
Similarly, in criticizing other people who might or might not be working for wrongdoers (and who might or might not have an easy choice to work elsewhere) there are competing values at stake.
Well what are the true standards for when criticism is appropriate? And please demonstrate that your answer is correct.
I’m not sure what your point is here. My position is that each and every piece of knowledge (at least knowledge about the real world outside of your mind) is fundamentally a reasonable assumption.
Do you disagree with me? If you do, I would love to see an example of a piece of knowledge which is not ultimately just a reasonable assumption.
As we know from history, a statement’s being true or false does not imply that it (or its negation) is easily demonstrable, especially in a context like this. Nevertheless:
My claim is that moral criticism is illegitimate unless it is made from a position of knowledge concerning the situation of the one criticized. Here’s a brief argument for that claim. If I am criticized based on mistaken views about my situation, then the criticism quite literally isn’t aimed at me–it’s aimed at someone of a description which I do not match. So it would be illegitimate for me (or anyone) to think of it as a criticism of me. In other words, if it is a criticism of me, it is illegitimate.
That’s really brief and I can already see a few ways it could be clarified. But I’m hoping you can see how that process of clarification would work as it’s not really a discussion I feel like I have time to have right now. The topic is huge.
This could be a purely verbal dispute. In my dictionary, “assumption” in this context means “something believed on the basis of a basic kind of justification rather than on the basis of justification from other propositions.” Some bits of knowledge are assumptions in that sense. “This is red,” for example, is often both an assumption and a bit of knowledge. But “The speed of light is the maximum speed of anything with mass” is something that I know, but do not merely assume in the sense I just defined. I believe it based on other propositions which I also believe, and I believe those based on other propositions. It is plausible to me that if you follow the chain back, you arrive at assumptions. But “The speed of light is the maximum speed of anything with mass” is not itself an assumption. It is something known on the basis of assumptions.
I see the Fruitcake Brigade has arrived to do battle on this issue. We can all rest easy, now.
And the Dumbass Division is here as reinforcements. The world is now Safe for Stupidity.
Lol, blah blah blah, I’m brazil84!
Apparently my pointlessly contrived, tangential, unrealistically ill-conceived hypotheticals are too airtight for you to refute.
[paste boiler plate weaseling and strawman accusation here]
Goodbye, liar.
Huh. You mean the knowledge that only the CFA cashier has in her head on her stance on SSM? That kind of knowledge is exempt from your argument?
Or are you reasonably assuming she’s against SSM, because she wears a headset, and fills the till at CFA.
Would you stake your anonymity on this message board if it turns out you’re wrong about your assumptions? Adam Smith did all over the net, and it went gangbusters for him.
I have surmised the reasonable assumption that you’re the biggest idiot in the history of idiots.
It’s a toss up. There’s no doubt your nomination deserves a top two finish, but Robot claimed CFA was trying to murder him by selling chicken sandwiches.
That certainly puts him in the running too. To be fair, there should be a vote.
CFA directly donates money, raised by selling junk food, to groups which want to oppress gays in every way including jailing and murdering them, and their CEO is on record as fully endorsing the “God will smite America if we don’t get rid of the gays” position. Your reaction to this well-cited evidence is to say “you’re insane for thinking that” because you prefer not to deal with the moral consequences of living in a country where fifty percent or more of the population thinks it’s great. Don’t know what else to tell you.
Forgive my ignorance, but which groups advocate jailing and murdering?
I think it’s rather reasonable to assume all Chick-Fil-A employees go into the walk-in freezer to perform anti-gay rituals and ceremonies, including drinking form the Chalice of Heterosexuality (concentrated Diet-Coke syrup) at the close of each business day.
I’ve also seen them perform the sign of the Comb of the Cock (left hand, spread out, with the thumb lying against the scalp) when they think I’m not looking.
(Chris Matthews and a spokesman for the Family Research Council on Hardball)
I missed it. Where’s the part about advocating murder again?
I could swear that they directly lobbied for the anti-gay laws in Uganda which would have given the death penalty for certain homosexual acts. But Wikipedia doesn’t say one way or the other, and I haven’t looked any further.
FRC lobbied against a bill condemning the Uganda “kill the gays” initiative. People continue to deny it, including shrieking “WHERE’S THE CITE” after screenshots of the disclosure forms are posted, but it happened.
Surely your position is not “any form of homophobia short of actual genocide is acceptable if not laudable”, though, right?
The FRC is an evil organization with horrific ideas about homosexuality. But their beef with that resolution wasn’t that it was anti-death penalty for homosexuals, but rather that it called homosexuality a civil right.
Even if you believe this ridiculous spin, how does it make it any less awful that this is where CFA’s profits go? We’re back to the typical Obama party line of patting yourself on the back for supporting everything up to but not including murder and bravely standing up to those who support murder.
I haven’t said it makes it any less awful. In my judgment, being doomed to life as a victim of systemic oppresion can be as bad as being doomed to die. (Anyone who thinks that a life sentence in prison could be worse than the death penalty should agree with me.)