Monday, March 21, 2011

Fallacyopian tubes

Philosophy students know of Hume's and Moore's "naturalistic fallacy", his attack on arguing that because something is so, it ought to be so.

Contemporary biologist Bernard Davis coined its converse, the "moralistic fallacy", when one argues that because it ought to be so, it is so.

A lot of liberal palaver strikes me as illustrating the second problem. It would be good for races and sexes and cultures to be equal, so they are. Any contrary evidence must be wrong, or a lie or irrelevant. So there.

I am sure that a lot of conservative positions could be attacked under the first heading. Although the argument has been made that the naturalistic fallacy is itself fallatious.

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