I think it raises interesting issues if there is a large gap between somebody's moral injunctions and the way they actually lived their life. Rousseau, Marx & Bertie Russell are all good examples.
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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.
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
New conversation -
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Fair point, though “outlier” assumes some measure along a known dimension, while people are complex and moral behavior hard to explain.
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