Authenticity, philosophy, and advocacy (was Re: SC - questions)
david friedman
ddfr at best.com
Thu Jun 15 19:27:59 PDT 2000
At 7:11 PM -0400 6/15/00, Morgana Abbey wrote:
>You think you're writing helpful advice. To those of us who've never met
>you, a lot of you come across as little Hitlers who would think nothing
>of storming into someone's kitchen and berating them for not doing things
>exactly like you would. Now I know everyone is gearing up into full
>denial, but that is how a lot of these posts are reading.
More precisely, that is how a lot of these posts are being read.
I can't speak for anyone else, but part of the reason I have just
written two long posts responding to Balthazar on some of these
issues is that I disagree with what seems to me to be the underlying
assumption that leads to people reading posts this way--that one
cannot argue passionately for doing something without being in favor
of using force to make other people do it. Or, alternatively, that
passionate arguing for something is somehow equivalent to forcing
people to do it.
More generally, I am opposed to the approach that holds, at least
implicitly, that nobody is ever entitled to tell anyone else anything
since all opinions are equally valid, whether or not there are
arguments and evidence to support them, truth being different for
every individual. No living person believes that--if they did, they
wouldn't bother to take their cars or computers to be fixed by people
who know something about the subject instead of doing it themselves
or picking someone at random to do it. But a lot of people seem to
have been somehow talked into thinking they believe that, and end up
writing as if they believe that.
Not only do I think the position is indefensible, I think it makes it
substantially harder for people to talk with each other. When what A
really wants to do is to persuade B that something is true, he has to
pretend that he is merely suggesting that B might perhaps be
interested in ... . Which is one of the reasons that I take any
convenient opportunity to argue against that position. Fortunately
Balthazar is more reasonable in practice than in theory, judging by
his past responses to posts where I disagreed with him, so a good
person to argue such things with.
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
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