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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2157326" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think you are making an argument by false analogy.  Systems of ethical belief are not analogous to sports teams.   Also 'best' in the sense you use in the above sentence is not the same as 'correct', as can be simply seen by replacing the words.   You would not ask a sports fan who is the correct Football or Baseball team.   Just because you can use 'best' or 'correct' interchangably when talking about ethics, doesn't mean the words are always synonyms.The reason that the analogy is false is that in general people do not base thier ideas of who they believe themselves to be on which football or baseball team is best.   A person's belief in which sports team is best usually is not a particularly important guiding principal in thier lives.   Most people simply do not give this a particularly high priority when determining how to live thier lives.   Very few people believe that the fact that one sport's team is better than another has any impact on how they 'ought' to live thier lives.  The same is not true of people's beliefs about morals and ethics.To the extent that your analogy actually would have any merit, it would only be found in cases where a person's belief about the superiority of a sports team was in fact part of what they saw themselves to be.   The more profound a person's belief in the superiority of a sports team impacted thier daily life, the better we would expect allegiance to sport's teams to resemble allegiance to a moral code (or lack thereof).   And in fact, when this is the case, you'll find that the analogy supports my position.   For sports fans for which allegiance to particular team defines to themselves who they are, you'll find that thier answer about what team is best is not objective but obviously betrays thier adherence to the ideas that they believe that team stands for.   The more this is the case, the more the answer to which sports team is best says more about the person than it does about sports teams.  For example, you would NOT expect to a true Boston Red Sox fan to ever admit to himself (or anyone else) that the New York Yankees were a better team, and when it appeared to you objectively that this was the case, then you had grounds for classifying that person as a 'Boston Red Sox'.   Similarly for Arsenal vs. Manchester United, or England vs. Ireland, or Auburn vs. Alabama, or the Yankees vs. the Brooklyn dodgers or any other rivalry where the allegiance to a team helps define a person's character.</blockquote>

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