Coming from Rousseau, given the appalling way he treated his friends, women (particularly Therese Levasseur), benefactors, that's a bit bloody rich!https://twitter.com/sarahrutherfor2/status/1008464184365998080 …
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I would say A stood for the right principle and B stood for the wrong principle, whether I knew what they personally did or not. That A is a criminal and B merely a hypocrite certainly doesn’t undermine A’s principle more than B’s. 3/3
Hang on a minute, you're talking about principles qua principles, but my response was - "The failure of somebody to live up to their own moral system can certainly be evidence against *the theory of human nature* upon which the system is built."
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And I was taking seriously both the words *can* & the idea of evidence rather than logical necessity. Bertrand Russell's failure doesn't tell you anything abt the principles underpinning free love, except it suggests, given what we know about his life, they're hard to live up to.
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If your response is that one person's life can't tell us anything about that sort of thing - I think that's not right. We can know enough about a person's life to make a judgement about whether they're likely to be psychological outliers.
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Of course that means we have to know something about other people so we can make a judgement about whether a particular person is psychologically unusual, but we don't have to know how lots of other people have lived up to the particular moral injunction under consideration.
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Even in the difficult example of your child molester I think it does tell us certain sorts of things (e.g., compulsion isn't easily resisted, it won't be wildly unusual in the population at large, etc), some of which might have moral implications in terms of how we handle it, etc
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Again, not as a matter of logical necessity - you can't rule out the possibility that the particular person is unique - but as a matter of abductive inference.
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All fair points. I don’t really disagree, except that we probably have different degrees of trust in evidence based on individual cases.
End of conversation
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You are right, my example spoke to the earlier tweet, but not so well to the one it directly responded to.
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