But If You Can't Ever Actually Find Any Truth...

By -

This poster implies that anyone who claims to have stumbled upon any truths is to be avoided. But, if finding the truth is illegitimate, what is the point of seeking after it?!

Comments

  1. John Goes2:10 PM

    They would counter (assuming some kind of nihilism), "because the truth can only be approximated."

    Seraphim Rose's "Nihilism" has a rather interesting account of the general nihilist phenomena (of which this "secular humnanism" is a species) that you might like, Gene. I wonder if you've read it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. skylien3:32 AM

    This statement should not be taken to its extreme since it (in my view) obviously is an oversimplification. Just like "Never say never". It carries the "truth" that in most cases you will be right in following its conclusion.

    Though if you are strict you will notice that the statement cannot be used even on itself since it contradicts itself.

    Like "Never say never" is a contradiction in terms, also the statement about denouncing people who proclaim to have found truth is just the same: A truth uttered by someone who himself thinks to have found truth. Therefore it should be ignored if you wanted to follow its conclusion...

    Do you think that such statements are useless therefore? Or can they be understood just as some kind of rule of thumb, that when in doubt it is good to follow?

    I think these statements should rather start with "Mostly". Yet I know that this would take out a lot of their ability to get attention through sounding absolute. So I think basically it is just a rhetorical trick to get people thinking...

    ReplyDelete
  3. skylien6:25 AM

    Did my comment from yesterday not get through?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

St. Paul and I Agree...

By -
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Read more

Against their will / we were taxing against their will / we were young and we were strong and we were taxing against their will

By -
Never one to allow a mistake to go uncompounded by a glaring error, Bob Murphy digs in deeper . He claims that "Taking money from people against their will is not akin to getting on the treadmill; it is akin to killing people against their will." Bob has introduced a largely irrelevant criterion here with his "against their will." Let us start with killing. (No, no, not killing Bob : we still love him despite his obstinacy.) The justice of a killing does not depend at all on whether the "victim" wants to be killed. If I shoot someone who is attempting to set off a nuclear weapon in Times Square, the fact that I killed him "against his will" does not make my killing immoral. And if a friend who is in despair asks me to shoot him in the head, the fact that he wants me to kill him would not make my action moral. Similarly, in taking money from people, the crucial question is whether you are taking it justly or unjustly, not whether they wan...
Read more

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Read more