Legal backups?

[Breetai]

[Limewater]

All I should have to say to Limewater's question is this: a government that can accuse citizens of being criminals without a good reason is considered unjust (i.e. "wrong") by any modern, free society.

Thank you for the serious reply.

Are you then saying that the general consensus of modern, free society is the true determiner of morality?

[Limewater]

My wants have nothing to do with the principles of physics or biology. But if you say you've discovered a new particle or gene, I'm not going to believe you unless you give me evidence. Moral determinations must be related to argument because all determinations must be related to argument. There is no a priori knowledge. There may be some unprovable truths out there (Godel assures us that there are), but I don't know what they are, you don't know what they are, and anyone who claims to know what they are is running a scam. So I'm happy enough to ignore them, if you can't prove it it might as well not exist.

Thank you for the serious response.

I actually agree with a lot of what you said above. I'm not sure I could say that anyone who claims to know unprovable truth is necessarily running a scam, though. I don't know enough to say if they were correct or not.

We can make moral determinations based upon reason, logic, and evidence. We rely upon these tools because they're pretty much all we have. That does not necessarily make them the key to real truth, though. We can make moral determinations, but absent knowledge of true, objective morality, we can't really evaluate those determinations.

I don't really see a strong basis for your final statement, though. You write, "if you can't prove it it might as well not exist." I can see why someone would say that, but I cannot see an objective basis upon which this determination can be made. (Not that I would trust such a basis anyway).

So, I guess in a sense, the part of your statement I agree with most is that, "There is no a priori knowledge."

[Limewater]

No, I laughed at your pitiful attempt at being cute.

I assure you that the post was serious and sincere. I was not trying to be cute. I don't know how else I could clearly answer the question you posed.

Yet, I did provide you the reason why it was absurd to deny it. You conveniently ignored it. Like you always do, because you're so so pleased with your role of assumption questioning.

Absurdity is an argument against an idea. Absurd ideas must be discarded, unless it can be demonstrated that they're not really absurd.

You should study more Mathematics. A lot of seemingly absurd things actually appear to be true. If you ever take a course in Real Analysis, the Cantor Set will probably be one of the first examples of this you will come across. It has some seemingly absurd properties.

You stated that if something is wrong it necessarily has good arguments against it. I still don't see where you've justified this statement.

What justification of the statement, "something which is wrong necessarily has a good argument against it" have I "conveniently ignored?"

Because I'm not arguing ethics. What I argued is that my definition applies to ethics. You disagree. In my recolletion, I gave a compelling argument why that is so. You didn't accept it.

You gave me two definitions. The second one you gave I can agree can be applied to questions of ethics and morality. But at that point it didn't really provide any useful information. The part that applied ot morality was just that something was "not right." It did not say anything about how one would determine rightness or wrongness. The second definition you gave could well be true. It just didn't answer my original question why something being wrong necessarily meant that there would be a good argument against it.

You don't even accept that you think I'm wrong based on the fact that you don't think I'm right.

I didn't say I don't think you're right. I thought I made it pretty clear that I didn't know if you were right or wrong.

Consequentialism is an assumption. The idea that, if something is wrong, it must have a reasonable argument against it, is one also.

It is not. It's even a pressuposition of argumentation. But you don't agree. Let's move on.[/quote]

I assume you're referring to the second statement (the existence if an argument). I'm willing to consider the idea that it is not an assumption, but that would require a logical proof based upon some other axiom. If you're up for it, go for it.

Out of curiosity, what in this case do you consider to be the important distinction between an assumption and a presupposition? When is a presupposition NOT an assumption?