But a failure of someone who advocates for a moral principle to live up to it is not a valid argument against the moral principle itself. Just like an advocate’s strict adherence is not a valid argument for a principle.
-
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.
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.
-
-
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
-
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.
-
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 -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.