Weekend Jukebox and Open Thread

RTod in reply to stillwater says:

Stillwater:

My comment wasn’t meant to be a critique of your argument, so much as an observation about how I am becoming concerned (tired?) with the way people are using the metaphor of philosophy to better position an argumentative stance at the expense of resolving a real life question or issue at hand.

In this instance, I was referring to a proposition that has been made somewhat frequently since I’ve been coming to the league, often by the same person. It comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, but can be boiled down to this: “I know/don’t think you believe in God. Since all wisdom/knowledge/morality comes from a belief in God, your arguments about this other subject are moot.” Usually someone (I have certainly been that someone upon occasion) has pointed out that there is plenty of evidence that secular people can behave just as morally as the next guy, or that there is no data that supports the existence of a spectrum where the more fundamentally religious you are the less likely you are to cheat/lie/steal/commit adultery/etc. and vice-versa. Or perhaps they point out some other set of data from the real world that makes the original proposition appear obviously false. Rather than deal with those arguments, I have noticed that people fall into the escape of changing the argument into an academic, philosophical argument. That is to say, rather than answer the evidence at hand, the writings of Aristotle, or St. Augustine, or some lower-tier 20th century German talking head are brought in. My problem with this approach is that it never answers the issues at hand, it simply changes the existing set of parameters into one that the person feels like they have superior knowledge of, and can therefore win. (“I don’t know that I can speak to why studies don’t show that fundamentalists commit no crimes and atheists most crimes, but I bet I know more about [insert philosophy text I know really well here]!)

You yourself took my observation, and rather than respond to it (which I would welcome; I actually like being proved wrong) you reframed the argument to be an issue of the size of my vocabulary vs. yours. (“Were there too many big words in that argument?”) For the sake of argument I’ll just concede that yours is bigger, but that doesn’t make you right, or for that matter even address that you might be.

For the record, though, this isn’t just a thing that I notice with this line of debate. In the recent posts about Muslims in America, for example, Tim had said (correctly, I believe) that there are many white Americans who simply don’t believe that a Muslim is cable of being a good American. E.D. refuted this with the obvious point that this patently false, as there are millions of Muslims who ARE good Americans. There were several who argued on that thread that E.D. was wrong, and that Muslims cannot be good Americans. But rather than deal with the issue of the millions of Muslim Americans that proved their argument wrong, they turned to old theological texts that dealt with very specific (and to my afraid-of-big-words brain, obscure) Muslim epistemology that declared that their point of view was in fact spot on. Not surprisingly, not many know enough about these texts to go toe-to-toe, so by default they win the argument.

Except, of course, in the real world they’re still wrong; those millions of peaceful, law abiding and productive Muslims annoyingly continue to be good citizens.

I could go on an on with other examples, but here’s one last one: When HRC was raging, there were lots of people who argued that no change in our healthcare system was necessary. If I brought up the fact that the system has been growing in cost by about 10% a year and that this was unsustainable, or that as this was occurring longevity was increasing but the level of health per person under 60 was actually decreasing, I got a lot of people switching the argument to, essentially, who could better argue the text of The Road to Serfdom. I admit I’ve never read it, so I will always lose those arguments. But that doesn’t stop the costs from increasing 10% a year, or get us any closer to finding a way to address the problems associated with those increases.

Or to put my gripe more simply, I am starting to think of Philosophy, in a non-academic setting, as the debater’s equivalent of Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse in Snow Crash. That is, a place where you can totally kick ass without having the burden of being tied to the issues in the real world.Report

RTod in reply to tom van dyke says:

Tom:

I can’t tell if you’re trying to be ironic here or not. If so, disregard. If not, well… this would be a really good example of what I’m talking about:

The proposition that I made an example of was Bob’s insinuation that if you don’t believe in God, you can’t be a moral person; the problem I pointed out with these types of arguments is that in order to win them, you have to ignore all real-lfe evidence to the contrary and instead rely on what you hope is a superior knowledge and skill base in Philosophy.

Here, you have (I think?) defended Bob’s position by defining natural law with Biblical references, referenced the works of Aquinas, Plato and Aristotle, thrown in the additional concept of modernism, and tossed in a supreme court quote and reference in for good measure. All of these points are fine and well; all are 100% correct; all of these win you the argument by showing you an intelligent, intellectual and well-read young man, and – bonus – they even get a rousing cheer from Bob.

What they don’t do, though, is tackle the issue that there is no real life data to support the position that you cannot be a moral person if you do not believe in God, and gobs of evidence to refute it.

If you want to convince me that Bob’s assertion is correct rather then just playing to the home-field crowd, (and you might not be trying to convince me of Bob’s position), explain to me why all the data shows him to be wrong; or produce data that backs his position up. If all you have to fall back on such a moronic and inflammatory claim is the ability to wield your knowledge of Philosophy, then you win the smart-guy contest hands down – but you do so by side-stepping the core issue at hand.

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About the Muslim part of your response: your point doesn’t actually address what I was talking about, and seems to be more of a really good response to a claim that I don’t believe that everyone who has concerns about Muslims is a bigot; but good stuff anyway. All good points, and a different way of looking at some points that I hadn’t considered, and appreciate. Thanks.Report