4,096 characters, 3 days, and as far as I know no good alternative except for a very complex argument with no previous formal representation. This made for a challenge I was not able to do very well at.
Omitting "(or at least equal to alternative(s))" from the definition of "justified" would have made it a lot easier, but I wanted to see if I could formalize my axiological position, and I underestimated the character requirement to do that well given my abilities.
I may be wrong and you may have already accounted for this, but isn't it plausible that people mean "Looks barely matter, I almost exclusively care about personality." when they say things like what you referenced in your last comment here?
Thanks for the vote, I believe I meant to refer to this ("Ethical subjectivism stands in opposition to moral realism, which claims that moral propositions refer to objective facts, independent of human opinion;") in
The problem being that, if moral prepositions don't refer to objective facts independent of human opinion, they must be descriptive (describing something about human opinion that is not independent of it).
But I definitely should have dedicated more of my arguments to establishing that. I am much more accustomed to informal debates where it's virtually guaranteed that I can later fill in these sorts of gaps when necessary.
I would probably have used Novice's forfeiture as an opportunity to further establish arguments, but I genuinely thought he was too busy to give an argument in R2. I thought it would be unfair to have the opportunity to essentially get 10k more characters, and I underestimated how big the gaps that I left in my argument are.
I'm fine with that, I am an agnostic atheist (as in below 50% but above 0% confident in the existence of God, probably specifically somewhere around 1-5% confident).
There are a bunch of counterarguments and nuances that I didn't properly address, but given that Pro unfortunately (and to no fault of their own) didn't provide an argument, I think this should be sufficient.
Sorry Trixie, you probably didn't realize either:
- you would have to be available in the 2 hours after someone accepts.
- or how long it would take for someone to accept.
I'm not sure what the best colloquial way to explain it is, I've tried and failed to explain it to many people before. But I'll give it my best shot.
I mean to omit definitions pertaining to things like moral subjectivism. I mean to refer to things that we "genuinely" ought to do, not something like "well I define what's ethical as what maximizes pleasure and minimizes suffering" or anything like that. It has to involve some "genuinely" good or bad thing, it can't just be some arbitrary aspect of reality that we have no reason to believe we actually genuinely ought to follow/maximize/minimize/etc.
No worries, I enjoyed it and it's completely understandable to lean away from conceding. You did well in the last round to take advantage of several ambiguities I should have clarified. I'll have to better prepare for that sort of strategy in the future.
And to anyone reading, I don't think this would at all count as a final round Blitzkrieg by Lemming.
The caveman argument only seems to work if "relationship" is defined in a very broad way.
You could argue that BuddhistBadass didn't provide a clear enough definition that we aren't warranted to argue against his position using such a broad definition, but the context (the description with lots of arguments in favor of many other kinds of relationships) certainly suggests that they're arguing against romantic relationships specifically.
So interpreting the resolution this way seems to go against the spirit of the debate.
I don't see how a murderer lacking remorse for a murder they committed would preclude that murder being wrong. And I don't see how else your argument supports the conclusion that murder is not automatically wrong, unless you're arguing against intuitionism or a strange version of subjectivism.
Would you like to debate it (or something like it) with me?
Hahahah that makes sense. I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment.
It seems like interactions like these too often end in apparent disagreement despite the fact that the people actually agree with one another, they simply don't understand the specific meaning they have for what they're saying. I'm glad we didn't end up like that, and thanks for answering all my comments on this!
I suppose I walked right into the "fundamental" counter-argument, I meant fundamental as in "The simple things that we can utilize in our everyday lives without too much work", not in the literal scientific sense.
Regarding my usage of the word "theory", I did not mean to associate PTSD with what scientists would describe as theory. I meant to say that it seems so self explanatory that unless you've got significant evidence against it, it would seem it does indeed exist. And if it does exist, then I'd assume that psychology would exist to you as well.
I'm not very familiar with scientific terminology which is why I'm falling into all these semantic traps regarding scientific wording, I'm talking like an ordinary person rather than a quantum physicist.
Firstly, the statistical fuzziness in physics you've provided doesn't really prove your point, since I think we both agree even psychology's most fundamental theories are a little fuzzy, whereas the fundamentals of physics aren't so. You basically have to get into quantum physics and other extremely complicated fields to encounter fuzziness.
I don't know if PTSD is recognized as a theory, but I think it's pretty obvious that it exists given how people act after coming back from wars and such.
It's true I haven't done a preliminary Google search to confirm this, just as I haven't done a Google search to get into the semantics of every single word you've typed to make sure I understand what you're saying. Some things are self explanatory and don't require extensive research to back them up, I thought PTSD would fit that description seeing as it's so well known and thoroughly recognized.
Regarding my expectations on what you do, I'm treating this discussion as a discussion, that being an attempt to get to work together to get to the truth no matter what our current positions might be, so to some extent I would expect you to research something like PTSD if you really want to contest something so fundamental like that. I prefer discussions to debates regardless of the format, since I want to find the truth, not learn how to convince people of a lie effectively.
To Puachu:
Can you give me an example of this statistical fuzziness in physics? I was not aware it was there to a similar degree.
And I think there are psychological theories, they're simply a lot less well known and have a lot more complicated names and features.
For instance PTSD is a pretty well known psychological thing, it has a name and I'd consider it a theory backed up with a lot of evidence.
That makes sense, I understand your position better now. I do believe there is a theory, but it's not really as well recognized as something like physics...and I think that's largely because it's much more difficult to test and verify theories with psychology. It takes a lot of testing with a lot of people compared to something like physics which, as far as I'm aware, is pretty exact in how you can do experiments to find out what works and what doesn't. There's also a mixture of genes and other variables which change things in regards to psychology, it would be a bit like dealing with a lot of little universes with their own physics systems that sometimes align based on the environment and sometimes align based on the plans built to form them, sometimes seemingly a mix of the two.
I do think there are a few general truths regarding psychology, like it seems obvious trauma changes how we think about the world and would likely lead to things like crime and faulty relationships based on the distrust we could likely project into the world, based on patterns we see in studies like the ones I posted and again stuff I've seen in my own life. I do agree there's no official manual to the mind that clearly defines everything beyond the shadow of a doubt though, it's a tricky business.
I don't know if I'll be able to prove you wrong there, but it seems like common sense to me..I've studied by own behavior and the behavior of those around me in response to different environments and it seems to have an extremely significant correlation, but I understand anecdotal evidence is hardly compelling.
After doing a quick search, I find a few pages on the matter, but I haven't had the time to verify them so do let me know if there's a problem there and I need to look into it more. I'd definitely be willing to do more research on this if need be.
Forgive me for my lack of patience to be entirely semantically correct, psychology as a field of science doesn't cause criminals to rob banks. Psychology is the study of environmental factors that lead to mental developments that lead to bank robberies.
Admittedly close to the same logic, but not quite. The difference is that there's a clear reason why the sun rises everyday, and there's no reasonable reason to believe that it should rise because of telekinesis rather than what the established truth is. With psychology, the predictions of how a person will act based on their environment isn't usually predicted by other fields and it seems to make perfect sense that it would indeed by psychology that causes their actions based on common sense...if this thing called a human has a brain and their environment changes their actions and people who study how environments change human actions call that study psychology...it's reasonable to say that psychology can predict changes based on different environments causing different outcomes whereas other fields can't do the same. Of course you could argue places like Summerhill only worked because of genetics, and that's definitely a possibility. That's why I say I don't have enough hard evidence to prove beyond a doubt that it's psychology to someone else, but I've seen enough people change based on their environment in predictable ways to definitively assure myself that it does indeed exist.
Psychiatry and psychology are very much different subjects, I agree psychiatry is a pseudoscience. However...psychology ultimately is neurology. It's simply the outcome rather than the specific details. The forest rather than the individual trees. Take a neural network in a chess AI for example, neurology would be the science associated with looking at how the neural network as a whole was structured, whereas psychology would be looking at the outcome and what inputs lead to what outputs. Saying that psychology isn't real but neurology is...well, that's like saying that a chess AI doesn't have any readable output, which is clearly false because they can play against some of the best chess players in the world. It's also like saying the forest exists but the group of trees don't, again that simply doesn't make sense. Now, to get into the hard evidence rather than allegories for the specifics on whether or not humans have an output determined by input via the environment rather than genetics, I admittedly don't have a lot. I have enough that I'm convinced based on my own research alone that human psychology is real. I've had discussions with a passionate genetic determinist to test a lot of my ideas and I've come away with a better understanding of the subject as a whole, though thus far we remain disagreeing with one another.
Behavior can definitely be measured to some degree with neurology:
https://www.healthyplace.com/personality-disorders/psychopath/the-psychopathic-brain-is-it-different-from-a-normal-brain
And environment does seem to play a role, though maybe not a complete one:
https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-science-of-preventing-dangerous-psychopathy#2
Again I don't know enough to absolutely prove beyond a doubt that we aren't defined by genetics, but I do know that psychology exists. Too many predictions have been made and supported by future findings that had to do with psychology. I do think a lot of therapists misunderstand psychology though.
Good points, I could have done a better job describing exactly what I meant by "make sense", I do of course mean it in the sense of whether or not anarchism would be a beneficial societal structure, not whether it's logically coherent.
I can understand that, libertarianism seems to be a good balance between freedom and security, and it fits well with many background ideas.
It seems extremes in authoritarianism (statism) and libertarianism (anarchism) are supported by those who have unusual beliefs in other areas of life.
As an example, statism is often supported by those who want to feel secure and believe a strong government can offer that security, whether they be right or wrong in that belief.
And anarchism is often supported by those who have an extreme desire to feel free, even if it means removing all traditional means of ensuring security. They very often believe humans have the capacity to become extremely good given the right environment, again whether they be right or wrong.
Would "physical evidence" include things like abstract deductive reasoning?
If you believe you could do much better with the same setup (can be (a) different R1 argument(s)), I would be elated to argue as Con against you.
I agree.
4,096 characters, 3 days, and as far as I know no good alternative except for a very complex argument with no previous formal representation. This made for a challenge I was not able to do very well at.
Omitting "(or at least equal to alternative(s))" from the definition of "justified" would have made it a lot easier, but I wanted to see if I could formalize my axiological position, and I underestimated the character requirement to do that well given my abilities.
It seems like it will be impossible to avoid a self-defeating Con argument.
Even so, they would be unlikely to join this debate if that's the case.
I can relate, no worries.
I may be wrong and you may have already accounted for this, but isn't it plausible that people mean "Looks barely matter, I almost exclusively care about personality." when they say things like what you referenced in your last comment here?
Thanks for the vote, I believe I meant to refer to this ("Ethical subjectivism stands in opposition to moral realism, which claims that moral propositions refer to objective facts, independent of human opinion;") in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_subjectivism
The problem being that, if moral prepositions don't refer to objective facts independent of human opinion, they must be descriptive (describing something about human opinion that is not independent of it).
But I definitely should have dedicated more of my arguments to establishing that. I am much more accustomed to informal debates where it's virtually guaranteed that I can later fill in these sorts of gaps when necessary.
I would probably have used Novice's forfeiture as an opportunity to further establish arguments, but I genuinely thought he was too busy to give an argument in R2. I thought it would be unfair to have the opportunity to essentially get 10k more characters, and I underestimated how big the gaps that I left in my argument are.
I'm fine with that, I am an agnostic atheist (as in below 50% but above 0% confident in the existence of God, probably specifically somewhere around 1-5% confident).
No guarantees but I'll try to read through and vote soon.
There are a bunch of counterarguments and nuances that I didn't properly address, but given that Pro unfortunately (and to no fault of their own) didn't provide an argument, I think this should be sufficient.
Sorry Trixie, you probably didn't realize either:
- you would have to be available in the 2 hours after someone accepts.
- or how long it would take for someone to accept.
What do you mean by *full* defensive position exactly?
That's right, "ought" is used differently colloquially vs in this context.
I believe I am essentially arguing against moral objectivism (or at least something very close to that, maybe there's a caveat I'm missing).
I believe that most people accept the existence of some kind of ought as I'm defining it, I believe I am arguing against the majority view here.
I'm not sure what the best colloquial way to explain it is, I've tried and failed to explain it to many people before. But I'll give it my best shot.
I mean to omit definitions pertaining to things like moral subjectivism. I mean to refer to things that we "genuinely" ought to do, not something like "well I define what's ethical as what maximizes pleasure and minimizes suffering" or anything like that. It has to involve some "genuinely" good or bad thing, it can't just be some arbitrary aspect of reality that we have no reason to believe we actually genuinely ought to follow/maximize/minimize/etc.
No worries, I enjoyed it and it's completely understandable to lean away from conceding. You did well in the last round to take advantage of several ambiguities I should have clarified. I'll have to better prepare for that sort of strategy in the future.
And to anyone reading, I don't think this would at all count as a final round Blitzkrieg by Lemming.
No problem, I hope I didn't misunderstand CON's arguments but I did my best.
The caveman argument only seems to work if "relationship" is defined in a very broad way.
You could argue that BuddhistBadass didn't provide a clear enough definition that we aren't warranted to argue against his position using such a broad definition, but the context (the description with lots of arguments in favor of many other kinds of relationships) certainly suggests that they're arguing against romantic relationships specifically.
So interpreting the resolution this way seems to go against the spirit of the debate.
I'm joining this debate fully expecting to lose, but it sounds kind of interesting and I'd love to learn about the god-like pokemon(s?).
That's understandable. And ahh I should have realized what you said was a jest, sorry, that makes sense.
I don't see how a murderer lacking remorse for a murder they committed would preclude that murder being wrong. And I don't see how else your argument supports the conclusion that murder is not automatically wrong, unless you're arguing against intuitionism or a strange version of subjectivism.
Would you like to debate it (or something like it) with me?
I only now saw your comment, that wasn't meant to annoy you! Just me trying to fit a counter-argument in whenever I can.
Hahahah that makes sense. I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment.
It seems like interactions like these too often end in apparent disagreement despite the fact that the people actually agree with one another, they simply don't understand the specific meaning they have for what they're saying. I'm glad we didn't end up like that, and thanks for answering all my comments on this!
I suppose I walked right into the "fundamental" counter-argument, I meant fundamental as in "The simple things that we can utilize in our everyday lives without too much work", not in the literal scientific sense.
Regarding my usage of the word "theory", I did not mean to associate PTSD with what scientists would describe as theory. I meant to say that it seems so self explanatory that unless you've got significant evidence against it, it would seem it does indeed exist. And if it does exist, then I'd assume that psychology would exist to you as well.
I'm not very familiar with scientific terminology which is why I'm falling into all these semantic traps regarding scientific wording, I'm talking like an ordinary person rather than a quantum physicist.
Firstly, the statistical fuzziness in physics you've provided doesn't really prove your point, since I think we both agree even psychology's most fundamental theories are a little fuzzy, whereas the fundamentals of physics aren't so. You basically have to get into quantum physics and other extremely complicated fields to encounter fuzziness.
I don't know if PTSD is recognized as a theory, but I think it's pretty obvious that it exists given how people act after coming back from wars and such.
It's true I haven't done a preliminary Google search to confirm this, just as I haven't done a Google search to get into the semantics of every single word you've typed to make sure I understand what you're saying. Some things are self explanatory and don't require extensive research to back them up, I thought PTSD would fit that description seeing as it's so well known and thoroughly recognized.
Regarding my expectations on what you do, I'm treating this discussion as a discussion, that being an attempt to get to work together to get to the truth no matter what our current positions might be, so to some extent I would expect you to research something like PTSD if you really want to contest something so fundamental like that. I prefer discussions to debates regardless of the format, since I want to find the truth, not learn how to convince people of a lie effectively.
To Sum1: That's interesting! I didn't know that.
To Puachu:
Can you give me an example of this statistical fuzziness in physics? I was not aware it was there to a similar degree.
And I think there are psychological theories, they're simply a lot less well known and have a lot more complicated names and features.
For instance PTSD is a pretty well known psychological thing, it has a name and I'd consider it a theory backed up with a lot of evidence.
That makes sense, I understand your position better now. I do believe there is a theory, but it's not really as well recognized as something like physics...and I think that's largely because it's much more difficult to test and verify theories with psychology. It takes a lot of testing with a lot of people compared to something like physics which, as far as I'm aware, is pretty exact in how you can do experiments to find out what works and what doesn't. There's also a mixture of genes and other variables which change things in regards to psychology, it would be a bit like dealing with a lot of little universes with their own physics systems that sometimes align based on the environment and sometimes align based on the plans built to form them, sometimes seemingly a mix of the two.
I do think there are a few general truths regarding psychology, like it seems obvious trauma changes how we think about the world and would likely lead to things like crime and faulty relationships based on the distrust we could likely project into the world, based on patterns we see in studies like the ones I posted and again stuff I've seen in my own life. I do agree there's no official manual to the mind that clearly defines everything beyond the shadow of a doubt though, it's a tricky business.
I don't know if I'll be able to prove you wrong there, but it seems like common sense to me..I've studied by own behavior and the behavior of those around me in response to different environments and it seems to have an extremely significant correlation, but I understand anecdotal evidence is hardly compelling.
After doing a quick search, I find a few pages on the matter, but I haven't had the time to verify them so do let me know if there's a problem there and I need to look into it more. I'd definitely be willing to do more research on this if need be.
http://marripedia.org/effects_of_family_structure_on_crime
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2771618/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-new-resilience/201310/why-the-impact-child-abuse-extends-well-adulthood
https://psychcentral.com/blog/how-childhood-trauma-affects-adult-relationships
Forgive me for my lack of patience to be entirely semantically correct, psychology as a field of science doesn't cause criminals to rob banks. Psychology is the study of environmental factors that lead to mental developments that lead to bank robberies.
Admittedly close to the same logic, but not quite. The difference is that there's a clear reason why the sun rises everyday, and there's no reasonable reason to believe that it should rise because of telekinesis rather than what the established truth is. With psychology, the predictions of how a person will act based on their environment isn't usually predicted by other fields and it seems to make perfect sense that it would indeed by psychology that causes their actions based on common sense...if this thing called a human has a brain and their environment changes their actions and people who study how environments change human actions call that study psychology...it's reasonable to say that psychology can predict changes based on different environments causing different outcomes whereas other fields can't do the same. Of course you could argue places like Summerhill only worked because of genetics, and that's definitely a possibility. That's why I say I don't have enough hard evidence to prove beyond a doubt that it's psychology to someone else, but I've seen enough people change based on their environment in predictable ways to definitively assure myself that it does indeed exist.
Psychiatry and psychology are very much different subjects, I agree psychiatry is a pseudoscience. However...psychology ultimately is neurology. It's simply the outcome rather than the specific details. The forest rather than the individual trees. Take a neural network in a chess AI for example, neurology would be the science associated with looking at how the neural network as a whole was structured, whereas psychology would be looking at the outcome and what inputs lead to what outputs. Saying that psychology isn't real but neurology is...well, that's like saying that a chess AI doesn't have any readable output, which is clearly false because they can play against some of the best chess players in the world. It's also like saying the forest exists but the group of trees don't, again that simply doesn't make sense. Now, to get into the hard evidence rather than allegories for the specifics on whether or not humans have an output determined by input via the environment rather than genetics, I admittedly don't have a lot. I have enough that I'm convinced based on my own research alone that human psychology is real. I've had discussions with a passionate genetic determinist to test a lot of my ideas and I've come away with a better understanding of the subject as a whole, though thus far we remain disagreeing with one another.
Behavior can definitely be measured to some degree with neurology:
https://www.healthyplace.com/personality-disorders/psychopath/the-psychopathic-brain-is-it-different-from-a-normal-brain
And environment does seem to play a role, though maybe not a complete one:
https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-science-of-preventing-dangerous-psychopathy#2
Again I don't know enough to absolutely prove beyond a doubt that we aren't defined by genetics, but I do know that psychology exists. Too many predictions have been made and supported by future findings that had to do with psychology. I do think a lot of therapists misunderstand psychology though.
Good points, I could have done a better job describing exactly what I meant by "make sense", I do of course mean it in the sense of whether or not anarchism would be a beneficial societal structure, not whether it's logically coherent.
I can understand that, libertarianism seems to be a good balance between freedom and security, and it fits well with many background ideas.
It seems extremes in authoritarianism (statism) and libertarianism (anarchism) are supported by those who have unusual beliefs in other areas of life.
As an example, statism is often supported by those who want to feel secure and believe a strong government can offer that security, whether they be right or wrong in that belief.
And anarchism is often supported by those who have an extreme desire to feel free, even if it means removing all traditional means of ensuring security. They very often believe humans have the capacity to become extremely good given the right environment, again whether they be right or wrong.