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 (especially if lots of other people fail to live up to it as well). It also likely has consequentialist implications.
-
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.