Pledge Of Allegiance: "One Nation, Under God"

Baelor · July 23, 2010, 2:57pm

Hardly. Because to say that they value a “right to life” is a justification behind the smaller issues. If people do not use that justification, you have no basis to assert that they hold that larger ideal.

Because “right to life” is defined by stances on issues that are objectively related to it. Note that you support this idea every time you use “meaningless murder” as a proxy for all right to life issues.

Let’s just be clear. I reject Rousseau as a legitimate source of knowledge. So, please, if it is his social contracts we are discussing, we may as well move on to something else.

Please lay out your definition and proof of the social contract now so we can resolve this.

I can. What I am debating is that I reject the notion of contractarian state-building/ethical thought, as well as the presence of a social contract beyond what is concretely determined, i.e. laws. So I’m not interested in starting with that assumption as a given because I reject it. If that is a problem for you, let’s end this now.

It sounds like you are talking about physician-assisted suicide. Because we have that term, euthanasia at least in the context of my posts implies a lack of agency in the decision.

The fact that it doesn’t address whether a person not subject to euthanasia is exactly and only that. Silence on other issues does not mean tacit agreement. It means only that they are not currently being discussed. So the fact that we are not discussing whether “typical” human beings should be slaughtered without purpose should not be considered anything other than silence. Your insistence otherwise seems to be completely without basis.

Furthermore, the “right to life” has not been established. What does the right to life mean? What is that ideal? You cannot define it without using issues; i.e. these ideals are literally the sum of the issues. To introduce any caveat at all is to make the ideal solely about the issues.

WRONG. All it means is that people are discussing euthanasia. Again, I have yet to see any reason to make this issue something larger than itself. All that I see is a debate about whether euthanasia is correct. Some people use the right to life ideal as justification. Others do not. Furthermore, you are making an enormous assumption that simply because an issue can be discussed, it will be. Again, silence does not necessarily mean that something is condoned. And you also run the problem of people rejecting a norm in favor of a larger one. For example, someone may totally reject the ideal of “right to life” consciously yet adhere to the larger ideal of concept X that is better served by silence on issues of, say, mindless murder.

I’m not concerned with mainstream justification. I’m concerned with every justification. And of course, unless you have statistics to support your assumption of what is mainstream, I suggest you stop asserting what you assume as knowledge.

But some might consider “meaningless murder” part of nothing broader. The problem with your construct of the social contract – and it is in fact only yours – is that you are not polling public opinion, you are lumping it arbitrarily into convenient categories. Furthermore, polls in general about moral issues are problematic – one could say that “right to life” is not against meaningless murder, or that one cannot support euthanasia and believe in a “right to life.” I understand what you are trying to say – that these are qualifications on the term. But I am saying that if people’s opinions on what these constitute are so vastly different as to be incomparable, then they are irrelevant.

I can claim that I love diversity, but I believe that diversity means killing someone a day. Would I be a good data point? No. Because the simple assertion that I like diversity is not reason enough to believe that I do. This is why the larger ideals must be discarded in terms of their more specific components, which actually identify the larger ideal. What does it mean to believe in a “right to life?” The ideal without specific issues is a vacuous concept.

Hardly. All it signifies is what those documents contain. You would need to establish that the specific ideals actually present in those documents are actually held by its constituents, versus the ideals being disagreed with but suppressed due to some larger ideal that places value on the original documents. So the fact that people live in a society with laws describing X does not signify that they agree with X (or even that a majority do), but that X by itself is not enough to prevent people from living there. I am simply stating that the idea of a social contract is stupid and not worth considering. Read some Hobbes. If you cannot let this go we should just end now.

You’re missing my point. My point is that the definition of murder is one that can be held by everyone. “Killing another person,” for example. The question is whether certain cases fit that definition. We’re not actually qualifying the issue of murder by introducing the debate about vegetarianism. What we are actually discussing is something completely separate – whether animals or humans. The issue of murder is simply a distraction from the actual topic; we are not qualifying it at all. Same thing with gay marriage.

No. We have not. That’s a jump in logic that I simply reject unless you can prove it more convincingly and conclusively.

1) I believe that gay marriage is actually an issue about murder. It is not. Period. So there is an objective level of this discussion about gay marriage that needs to be reached before it can actually be productive.

Qualifying discrimination is the act of saying, “This type of discrimination is acceptable.” That is not what is happening here. What we are discussing is whether this is even about discrimination. If it is not, we have not qualified discrimination because our stance on discrimination exists independently of this discussion.

2) No. We have not implicitly acknowledged any such ideal. I am unwilling to take this above the issue level until you give me a good reason to do so.

Correct. What the gay marriage opponents are saying is exactly that – the stance that gay marriage is a discrimination issue is totally absurd because the two issues are totally unrelated.

No, because I acknowledge that grass-eating is related to cows and horses.

You have not yet established that gay marriage is a discrimination issue. So for the purposes of this discussion, they may as well be completely unrelated.

Yes, if one were. But that is not a definition all people accept. Is this getting through to you on any level?

Only if they accept that definition, but yes.

Only if their justification is on the basis that discrimination is wrong, but this isn’t discrimination; or that this particular form is a qualification. In that case, yes. But one could make an argument on a totally different basis from which you could not infer a stance of discrimination because they’re not even talking about that.

So even if one were to acknowledge a vague ideal of discrimination and that the issue is related, one would need to include that in the justification for it to be a valid consequence that they oppose discrimination in general. For example,

“Marriage must be between two people of different genders. Therefore, not gay marriage.”

You cannot infer a view on discrimination from this argument because it doesn’t feature into it on any level. The fact that they are qualifying discrimination unintentionally does not mean that they accept it on premise.

That’s where people disagree because they don’t care what the legal definition is or are simply unaware of it. And if they reject the legal definition, then obviously their idea of the social contract is in contrast with the general populace, which makes the discussion irrelevant. People need to have the same bases if you are talking about something other than codified law. cf. above with the example of improper definitions leading to meaningless data.

Unless there were a larger ideal that acted in the opposite direction, e.g. “Proximity to family,” “living in the native country,” etc. That’s what I am saying.

But if the definitions of those concepts in the minds of the populace are different in pretty much any way, then they lose all meaning. If I think being happy means killing everyone, and someone else believes that being happy is not killing everyone (by definition), we reach an impasse. The social contract is dependent on common understanding of the definitions of these ideals.

east89 · July 23, 2010, 5:14pm

Seriously, give it up already. I already explained the “your claim” portion of my post and how that doesn’t necessarily correlate to me thinking that you believe in such reasoning. Moreover, you misquoted me. Didn’t you advise me not to do that before?

I never said “your logic is flawed.” If you want to make it seem like that, then that’s on you, but that wasn’t part of any of my statements. My post said:

“For that matter, we could very well stop black people from marrying with your logic, based on statistics which state that AIDS is more prevalent amongst African-Americans.”

“Your logic” was meant as your logic which you provided as a possible reasoning behind the ban. Still doesn’t meant I thought you undoubtedly believed in it. Again, you keep incorrectly inferring on my posts, even though you seem to be annoyed by it every time someone else does the same to you, yet you still continue. Just stop it. Your was used in the possessive sense that you said it, not that you necessarily believed it. Again, going back to the devil’s advocate argument, if someone were to play that role, I would not necessarily be attributing a statement to someone’s beliefs if I were to say that “your” claim is incorrect.

You’ve made a few grave mistakes on word choice in this thread. I mean, you said that Brown “UPHELD” separate but equal; used is instead of isn’t, which made your post contradictory (I know there was supposed to be a question mark there, but you didn’t add it); and then you made some nonsensical post about most African-Americans being black. I’m not bringing this up to offend you, but you seemed to drop those points after you saw that you erred, while I’m continually “holding on” to this because I firmly believe that your claims are not correct. I may be wrong about why you drop those points, though.

You seem to be holding on to this argument because you don’t want to lose.

This goes back to the drug-testing thread, where I thought that your use of the word “really” contradicted a later claim. I was wrong based upon what you said. I should have asked what you meant by “really” in the first place, instead of just jumping to my own conclusion. You should have done the same thing in this case.

Can we come to an agreement about what I meant now? If not, we’re just going to keep going back and forth, even though I’ve clearly explained what I meant and how it makes sense. I’m not willing to continue such an argument.

Actually, no you didn’t, but I provided it anyway. Here’s what you said:

See below for my explanation of how I actually did provide those stats. “Gay blacks” wasn’t included in that post. I can’t deny that you asked for straight black rates, though, and I’m not going to deny that.

Did I ever say you did? No. You asked if I had “a statistic handy which points to the percentage of straight, american blacks with AIDS.” I provided that.

Was it supposed to be logically inferred upon in this post:

<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1065287153-post135.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1065287153-post135.html</a>

If not, I don’t recall you saying that in response to me. That’s not to say it wasn’t said, but I didn’t read your responses to other people since I doubted that they would be pertinent to our argument.

You’re doing something else that you constantly complain about other people not doing. You didn’t read the entire article, did you? Read the entire page–specifically the table titled “Estimated adult and adolescent males living with an AIDS diagnosis in 2007 by race/ethnicity and exposure category”. It clearly states how the cases of HIV spread through heterosexual contact among black males is nearly three times higher than Latinos and nearly five times higher than whites. There’s stats for spread through homosexual contact in there as well. It’s a lot higher, but that wasn’t really the argument. The point was that heterosexual blacks should also be banned from being married according to the logic of trying to prevent disease, since, as you can see, the rate for heterosexual intimate contact transmission of HIV is alarmingly higher than all other ethnicities in the US.

east89 · July 23, 2010, 5:47pm

Tiff, ignore that last post. Just read this response: