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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6416051" data-attributes="member: 8461">Again, this is flatly incorrect. The latter is a negative assertion, hence why it's saying that something is not true.Again, you fail to grasp the futility of an "appeal to authority" statement; that's not even withstanding the issue of the rhetorical futility inherent in saying "go read something here, and you'll find something or other that agrees with me." That doesn't come close to the standards of what constitutes a debate.That you've been reduced to name-calling suggests otherwise.Hence one of the many, many differences between the agreed-upon nature of objective reality, versus the proposition of a so-called objective truth.Again, waving supposed credentials fails to live up to the "show, don't tell" rule of presenting supporting evidence in support of your claim. (Though honestly, the whole idea of introducing expert testimony into the inherently-personal realm of moral philosophy - due to it being entirely subjective and all - has always struck me as being, well...facile, to use your turn of phrase.)To put it another way, you're referencing the works of others with only vague specificity, refusing to provide either quotes regarding what you mean or citations to reference them (beyond a hand-wave towards some titles in general), and then expect that when people point out that you're being vague, that must mean that they know less than you do. That's not debating a point, that's obfuscating one.Except that it can easily be demonstrated that there are differences between descriptive predication and moral predication. The former can be used to discuss either the inherently subjective nature of morality, or the subjective or objective nature of reality; the latter is only able to discuss the subjective nature of morality. The idea that there's no differences between them is preposterous.Leaving aside that having to cast insulting terms like "tremendous ignorance" betrays the fact that you're struggling to come up with a counter-point, what you quoted does not at all "miss the point" that you raised - rather, it deftly refutes it. The nature of the conjunctive "and" here does not at all necessitate that it be truth-conditional; that's a claim so outlandish that it's hard to take seriously. Simply because you can link two ideas together does not mean that they'll therefore both need to be true, which necessarily undercuts the nature of your point that these truth conditions can be taken as inputs. Consider that being sent to you, pemerton.See above; name-dropping without any further citations (let alone providing a proper quote for discussion and analysis) does not an argument make. Saying "go read the books that (I purport) agree with me" is something that's done when you can't make the points you want to make.Saying that this is a good-faith argument is hypocritical in the extreme here, since all you're doing is calling out names and saying "these guys support me! Honest!" As far as I can tell, you're completely unfamiliar with the idea that you have a higher burden of proof to live up to if you want to actually appeal to authority.Just so long as you're willing to accept that it's valid that from the point of view of others, you haven't answered that question at all.Except that this is self-evidently not the case, as per my posts above.Again, despite your saying that that can't be so, it clearly is, since it has been resolved.It's actually a powerfully developed argument, which is why you're having a hard time trying to knock it down. That said, here's how the refutations you do make can be shown to be invalid (that is, not being able to withstand logical scrutiny): The fact that Abbott's beliefs are no truer than those of IS is not odd at all, because the two being in contradiction is the indicator that neither has any greater degree of truth than the other - both are personal beliefs, and so have no objective metric by which their "truth" can be judged. Both beliefs can be equally "true" at the same time because they're held by different individuals, none of whom have any empirical methodology (or credentials, for that matter) in how they would pass judgment on the beliefs of others. Given that Abbott's justifications are thus no truer than anyone else's, then it makes it clear that all he is doing is projecting his power onto them - hence the definition of wars as being struggles of military power, rather than a contest of opposing ideologies (which further would lead to the idea that those who win wars are those with the truer morality, which is clearly an objective falsehood). Of course, this has nothing whatsoever to do with "committing the very crime he claims they are committing," since that's a conflation of a legal argument with a moral argument. As such, Abbott's attacking IS is indeed his acting on personal conviction - that's not hypocritical because he's acting in accordance with his own beliefs, while recognizing that the beliefs of others are different from his own, even if they have no greater weight insofar as how "true" they may be.More reference-less name-dropping. Try an experiment in your next post - don't mention anyone else's work unless you can quote it directly and cite the source.</blockquote>

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