RelativeSpace
Critical Thinker
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2012
- Messages
- 277
Demonstrating that you were lying when you made that claim before that you would stop eating chocolate if somebody provided any evidence that it was harmful.
Little is not none. Your claim was clear, and you just backed out of it with a lame excuse (like all of your other lame excuses).
This completes the jump from intellectual dishonesty to actual dishonesty.
You know what? I eat Hershey's chocolate sometimes. It tastes pretty good (not the best, but pretty good).
It's morally wrong. When I do so, I'm doing something bad.
I'm not perfect- sometimes I do wrong things.
I hope that the balance of my actions in the world is good, but I won't try to claim that either.
The difference between you and me is that I am intellectually honest enough to admit that I do wrong things sometimes, and I don't have to rationalize away valid arguments.
Yes, you should have- and left it at that. But you did not. You made weak excuses based on false assertions.
And guess what? You just made another:
More BS.
This. THIS. It is the only actually rational (rather than rationalizing) thing you have said. Of course, it is not an argument. But it is an actual whole sentence without logical fallacy.
It is something I could respect if you said it by itself. Just admit that you aren't going to change no matter how moral or immoral something is, no matter how easy or difficult, or anything else.
You don't care. And that's fine. You don't have to care. Nobody is making you care.
Just say that, and stop pretending to care and rationalizing your behavior.
I don't need to rationalize my behavior when I do something wrong- see the Hershey's thing above.
GlennB has the same intellectual honesty. We understand. Eating meat is wrong (not the eating bit, but the supply and demand that lead to production). We get that.
That doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to totally stop eating meat- but we can at least admit that it's wrong without sacrificing our intellectual integrity and defending bad logic.
Why are you so opposed to joining the club of intellectually honest, but morally imperfect, people?
More than enough evidence to prove your intellectual dishonesty beyond any reasonable doubt.
It's something you could change, right now, if you wanted to. And you wouldn't have to change your behavior either- you'd just have to admit the obvious and stop rationalizing.
That would have been fine if you did not then use arguments from your ignorance (and additional logical fallacies) as excuses for eating meat.
If you're going to eat meat, just eat meat! Don't make excuses. The bad excuses are what make you intellectually dishonest- and it is the intellectual dishonesty I'm criticizing here.
Act of eating meat? I'm not criticizing this. Yes, it's morally wrong, but you, and all of us, have every right to do it. We all do things that are morally wrong (Hershey's chocolate included), who's going to cast the first stone?
Rationalizing your morally wrong actions with bad logic? This I, Dessi, GlennB, and a number of other people here are criticizing.
Just stop doing that.
Just say "I get it, it's not really nice to kill animals and probably immoral if it's not necessary for our survival- which is isn't anymore- but it's legal and I like eating meat (and chocolate) and I'm not going to stop because of that."
It's not difficult.
Link
You could have Google searched- it would have taken two seconds- to know what I was talking about. Several other people in this thread already knew what it was without a link- it's common knowledge in the food industry.
Do I need to provide a link to explain what table salt is too, if I bring that up?
If I don't, are you going to say "What, Sodium Cyanide?? That's poisonous!"?
Very different kind of salt.
I get it- you're hostile because you're defensive. Your long held assumptions about the world are being challenged- more specifically your long held highly emotionally charged assumptions which were given to you by loved family members and highly correlated with important bonding experiences you have with them are being challenged.
That's the case for almost any woo- particularly woo that people have been indoctrinated with since birth. I understand your situation.
But if you have any pretenses about being a skeptical or critical thinker, you'll have to abandon that favoritism and look at it objectively.
It's something that I and GlennB can do (and I think Dessi too, as from what I remember she was also raised eating meat).
Whether we become vegetarian or continue to eat meat (maybe with a pang of guilt) because of it, that's irrelevant to the intellectual process of actually understanding.
That's not a strawman. Woo is woo.
For what it's worth, the UFOlogists actually make more sense than you do, and use fewer, less egregious logical fallacies. So, perhaps I owe the UFOlogists an apology there. It was an unfair comparison. To all UFOlogists who read that: My deepest apologies.
Because it's a mark of sanity and honesty. GlennB and I both admit it. If you ask Dessi, I bet she'd admit to still doing something that's immoral too. Probably even that other guy who they say doesn't have a sense of humor and likes Monty Python- I bet he'd admit moral imperfection too.
We all do things that are wrong. And to various degrees, we try to address those and change our behavior (sometimes with phenomenal success as Dessi has- sometimes less successfully).
No. Whether you are a moral or an immoral person can only be told from the balance of your actions. We all do good and bad things. Nobody is simply good or evil- are you really stuck with that kind of preschool sense of emotional maturity?
Your eating meat (any of us eating meat) is merely one thing on the scale, in favor of bad. Many of us do a lot of good things in this world too.
You may be a great and wonderful person who devotes his life to charity and helping others- eating meat might be a tiny blemish on your otherwise perfect devotion to morality. I don't know.
I do know that you're being irrational, that you're being intellectually dishonest, and that you actually lied to Dessi. You seem to be obsessed with maintaining the image of your perfection at all costs. That's not good.
That's completely false, on both points. You have a lot to learn about Ethics and Politics.
See? Here you're spouting more ignorance and flat out empirical falsehoods to justify yourself. It's not good.
Certainly any of Mill's work is useful reading, as Mill advanced Utilitarianism- he was all about legislating a logical moral system.
John Stuart Mill said:
Utilitarianism is the foundation of animal welfare- and animal rights- and Mill was an important early philosopher in the field.
Even if all you've read is Mill, you should know better than to prattle on with the woo you're peddling. But even Mill is 150 years behind the times- Utilitarian philosophy has advanced greatly in terms of logic and application.
Try Peter Singer- he's a Utilitarian philosopher too- a MODERN one, 150 years advanced of Mill; with a modern understanding of biology and cognition, he surpasses Mill in his recommendations and logical application of Utilitarianism.
I don't agree with everything Singer says (or even most of it), but it would make a good start for you if you want to cure yourself of the ignorance you suffer from.
You didn't understand anything I said about Rand, so you should probably abstain from commenting on it.
It wasn't hand waved away- you made a logical fallacy in pursuit of rationalizing your claims.
I sympathize, but this is not a valid argument. What if somebody grew up in a culture where rape was a right of passage for boys, women were deemed property, and they were offended by your suggesting that it's immoral to gang rape your female slaves (which they consider good clean fun- and a loving father and son bonding experience) or that it was wrong to own women at all?
(hypothetically) You're being so RUDE to say gang raping your slaves is wrong. Shame on you!
You just don't understand the concept of being logically consistent. You're frantically rationalizing, and piling fallacies upon fallacies.
Take a few moments to use your brain- actually challenge yourself for once and consider: "How could what I said be translated into another cultural context where I would be on the other end? Would I find that to be an acceptable argument?".
That's what you really have to learn to do in order to be a critical thinker- and it's something you're spectacularly failing at.
No, it's doesn't. It's a logical fallacy.
It's only useless to make a logical argument against you because you either can not, or choose not to, understand them. I suspect it is willful ignorance, and that you are intelligent enough to if you tried.
You really need to do some reading before you spread nonsense like this.
I'm soo sorry you're offended by people criticizing your bad behavior. I'm offended too, when I do something wrong, and people call me on it. It's an unpleasant thing to have happen.
You know who's also offended by crticism? Pedophiles. They're offended that anybody can call the love and bonding between a man and young boy wrong. They think it's a good thing- or so they've convinced themselves.
That's not a straw man- that's a direct logical analog.
I'm not trying to say AT ALL that eating meat is AS BAD AS pedophilia. But it is a bad thing to do, and the motions you're going through to defend it are precisely identical to those of a pedophile defending his habits.
I'm sure you won't like the analogy- but the analogy is accurate (not in degree, but in general class- bad behavior being rationalized)- the whole point of the analogy is to be something you won't like so you can consider your behavior from another point of view.
I'm sure you'll cry foul and wine about the comparison, but if you can not comprehend the commonality here, you're more deluded than I thought.
"A variety of sexual partners, from adults to young children, are the spice of life! Yum!"
Ring any bells? Any at all?
None of your arguments are rational. Not one. Try to see your behavior, and your rationalizations, from another perspective.
You wouldn't accept a single one of your own arguments if the cultural context was changed and they were used to justify something you personally don't like. And you would be right to reject the arguments- they are bad arguments.
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. There are many other schools of thought that lead to animal rights.
Can you explain a little more?