From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 10:32:25 MDT
lcorbin@tsoft.com (Lee Corbin) writes:
>Dan (Technotranscendence) wrote
>> For the full essay, see http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/irrationality.htm
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>
>Yes, indeedy. I will agree that it is quite a good essay, well-written
>and easy to read, and well-informed on most points. However, the author
>in my opinion makes several errors. One is that he fails to appreciate
>how Pan Critical Rationalism explains learning and the retention of
>hypothesis (which is to say, he fails to acknowledge how conjectures
>really die).
I'll address this fallacy in a later post.
> Two, he doesn't address some cases where it seems to me
>obvious that values determine some political stances, and doesn't
>find the simplest explanation for some of his examples, like, duh, look
>to the ambiguity of certain words.
Huemer probably does misjudge the frequency with which people disagree
on the meaning of words. If you had bothered to read Robin's more rigorous
version of the argument, it would be even more obvious than it should be
from reading Huemer's version that this is irrelevant. If, for example,
leftists use "poverty" to mean inequality and rightists use it to mean
wealth levels that fail to meet some absolute threshold, epistemically
rational people would figure this out and rephrase their statements to
make clear which meaning of poverty they are using before developing any
persistent pattern of disagreement with other epistemically rational people.
> What underlying thesis supports the views that (a) capitalism
> is unjust, (b) abortion is permissible, (c) capital punishment
> is bad, and (d) affirmative action is just? Here I need only
> claim that these beliefs are *correlated*...
>
>Well, I can think of two (2) value differences that explain these
>political differences! One is that liberals rate inequality as
>much more damaging and unfair than do conservatives, and secondly
>many libertarians and conservatives (though not I, incidentally)
>consider it morally *unjust* for rich people's money or hard-
>working people's money to be taken from them by force for the sake
>of the poor. (I myself happen merely to think that it doesn't work
>out at all well to do so, even though I am a libertarian-conservative.)
The claim that those two value differences explain those four beliefs
correlations sounds wildly implausible to me. And if true, it would
merely change the issue to a factual dispute (over which epistemically
rational people wouldn't persistently disagree) over something like this:
people (or some other set of beings whose welfare the speaker values)
will be happier (or some other measure of utility will be increased) if
beliefs X and Y about property rights and equality are adopted.
>Now consider his flawed treatment of the capital punishment question.
>He thinks that it comes down to a factual dispute, and that the
>various partisan proponents disagree over the facts about capital
>punishment:
>
> Those who support capital punishment are much more
> likely to believe that it has a deterrent effect,
> and that few innocent people have been executed.
> Those who oppose capital punishment tend to believe
> that it does not have a deterrent effect, and that
> many innocent people have been executed. Those are
> factual [sic] questions, and my moral values should
> not have any effect on what I think about those
> factual questions.
>
>But those are not EASILY RESOLVED factual questions! Even more
The difficulty of resolving the factual questions has no obvious relevance
to Huemer's (and Robin's) argument.
I believe that capital punishment disputes could in principle be boiled
down to factual disputes, but I don't think this is easy to demonstrate,
and it isn't something that Huemer's claims depend upon.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | "To announce that there must be no criticism of http://www.rahul.net/pcm | the President, or that we are to stand by the | President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic | and servile, but morally treasonable to the | American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
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