The 'Nixon might not have been named Nixon' sentence is a classic example of how analytic philosophy often disappears up its own fundament, by agonisi...
It was great to see such a technical, dispassionate destruction of the claims. But it'll have no impact on Piers Morgan, who has about as much respect...
That's good isn't it? If we want fewer people to buy phones containing the products of forced child labour, the primary audience we need to address is...
Statement 1 is only correct if we replace 'Vegans' by 'Some vegans'. But that constraint may not necessarily harm your argument. However I can see no ...
I asked you for evidence that vegans generally assert what you say they do. You provided some quotes from this thread, which I then showed do not show...
I suggest you read them more carefully. Some refer to the meat industry - irrelevant to somebody who only eats what they kill. Another says veganism i...
Perhaps you're referring to discussions you've had elsewhere, because looking back over your interactions on this thread, your only interaction with a...
Only on uptake at a level that is way beyond what we know would ever occur. If you reflect on it, I think you'll find that a great deal of moral advoc...
Yes, I remember that. In reply I pointed out that veganism is a practice, not a philosophy, so trying to critique it as a philosophy is a category err...
Yes, I find Gary Francione's public advocacy of his position regrettable. It is so extreme and absolutist that it just encourages people to conclude '...
In this post you have shifted from solely criticising people being vegan to also criticising people campaigning for veganism. The two are very differe...
Good for you! Given those choices, I'm struggling to see why you would find fault with someone being a vegan. Their choosing to consume zero animal pr...
Answer mine first, which pre-dates yours, and is related to it: If you weren't saying that then point were you trying to make in this post? Now about ...
If we were to follow your prescription, we would be stopped from putting our ideals into practice - that's the point of the proverb. By the standard y...
In practice it's often not a problem. For instance two political parties might argue over whether a particular taxation plan should be adopted. They m...
That's because zero is not attainable in those other items. There's no reason why an inability to reach 'perfection' in one dimension should prevent s...
Are you now saying that your position is that if one doesn't do one of those things (some ludicrous, some that have no impact at all) then there is no...
They are not relevant to it because veganism is not a philosophy. It is a practice, and different people adopt the practice for different reasons - co...
I think it is very hard to justify unnecessary use of a car, which is why I very rarely drive, and try to get as many passengers as possible when I do...
Sure that's what most vegans seem to aspire to. My point is that advocacy of veganism is not rendered meaningless by being non-absolutist. I think it ...
I can see how one might take it that way when one comes up against militant vegans that angrily proclaim that anybody who has even tiny bits of animal...
Perhaps we are the most dangerous species, rather than the most violent one. After all, there are other species whose entire life is conflict and pred...
I'm sorry but I can't quite bring myself to believe that you really do not understand the difference between 'removing all harm' and 'reducing harm', ...
On the contrary, Peter Singer - probably the world's most influential and well-known vegan - advocates exactly that, ie minimising, or even just reduc...
No. It isn't. Try marching in a line up to a bunch of policemen that are systematically clubbing those that reach the front of the line on the head wi...
I'm afraid I am unable to make any sense of this. Are you denying that, for a typical city dweller that can only obtain food from shops, there is less...
The vegans you meet must be very different from the ones I do. The vegans I see wear recycled clothes, use bicycles for transport, minimise needless c...
Negative utilitarianism is not generally understood to mean that one should never do anything that causes suffering. To me it means that we prioritise...
No they're not. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, William Wilberforce, Emily Pankhurst, Yitzakh Rabin were all revered for their integrity and moral...
Here is what you said: The response to that was that the vegan causes less suffering and the moral principle they are following is to reduce suffering...
And NKBJ explained here why that is not contradictory. You have not responded to that explanation. If you still believe it is contradictory or a parad...
Hitchens' book needs to be read in the context of when he wrote it and his experience around that time. It was not long after the WTC attacks in 2001....
All too often one finds that, does one? Do you have any evidence to back up that claim? I doubt it. I am not vegan but most vegans I know are very con...
It would only be a paradox if being vegan included a moral obligation to go back in time and stop our ancestors from eating meat. But there are no tim...
There is no dilemma. Unlimited tolerance equates to complete indifference - to being an immobile lump. Nobody that has thought about it advocates unli...
I would be surprised to hear that Hume had written anything about Essence. Hume was an empiricist and a sceptic and believing in essences requires a m...
Just wondering, did you mean 'To claim' rather than 'To deny'? Surely most people would deny that claim, on the ground that our confidence is almost c...
I foresee this discussion heading towards Kant's CPR. While that is one of my favourite topics, it would probably be getting a bit far from the OP so ...
It seems that the argument over the statement (0) 'The man named "Nixon" might have had a different name' arises because one side uses a method in whi...
Popper's position, and mine, is that when a hypothesis graduates to a higher state it becomes a theory. There is no higher state than a theory. To say...
We can't directly observe that a planet, or any object, is spherical because we see in 2D and spheres are 3D. We have reams of data that are consisten...
I think your reasoning is broadly fine, and accords with Popper, who says we can never prove a theory true. The only significant difference I would ma...
It could be that the Earth we see as approximately spherical is actually a 3D cross-section of an object that is actually a 4D hypersphere. We can nev...
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