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If you think human sacrifice is good, then you should say so outright and explain why you believe that. If you think that ethics classes are not "total non-sense taught by dimwit professors" as the above poster claims, then you should say so outright and explain why you believe that.
But please don't gesture vaguely in the direction of doing further research to nay-say the value judgements of those who have stronger opinions than you.
There is no amount of research that will convince me that human sacrifice is good. It's not because I'm stubborn or closed-minded, it's because I have a coherent moral worldview. Reading about it may be interesting but it will never change my mind.
If the best argument in favor of university-level ethics classes you can muster up is that I should do more research so that I can discover for myself an argument in favor of their existence, then that suggests that they are truly without any value whatsoever. It's a rare and pitiable thing to see a position so devoid of merit that even its defenders can't bear to speak in its defense. If nothing else the Aztecs were at least capable of making arguments to justify their actions.
And this exchange gets sillier and sillier.
I did. (And did not.)
I have made no position on ethics classes taught by dimwit professors. The only educator I have recommended to Pasha is Pasha himself, and I decline to accuse Pasha of being a dimwit. I will even offer a concurrence that bad teachers- dimwit or otherwise- can ruin valid material. Take this as a concession if you'd like.
What I did do was suggest for Pasha himself take an opportunity on their own to study a specific sub-set of ethics, professional ethics, with the supporting justification-
I.e., I believe they should review different professional ethic systems to understand how they differ in what they emphasize. Specifically between fields where one profession accepts human harms that another profession would reject. At the very least, it can be interesting to understand how they do so.
I even restated and clarified it in the post you are responding to, in case it was not clear enough-
I.e., the value of understanding how different ethic systems work, besides that it can be interesting, is that it is useful when professional-ethical systems interact in various ways. This can apply when you are dealing with a professional consensus, potential professional conflicts, or cross-cultural divergences where a consensus might be.
If noting there are implications of potentially clashing ethical systems seems vague and nonsensical to you, this is an excellent indication of why further study on the subject would be beneficial. If you do not trust a professor to be able to help you with it, that would be an excellent reason to educate yourself instead.
The only way a suggestion for Pasha teaching himself about ethics violates the value judgement of dimwit professors teaching ethics is if Pasha is a dimwit professor. Again, I decline.
I suspect Pasha may think the subject matter of ethics is itself is [pick your pejorative]. Regardless of the strength of his opinion, I believe it is useful, and recommend he examine it in certain ways to learn the utility for himself, in a way that respects his dismissal of formal instructors of the subject.
Come on. There's a difference between "I am suggesting that people do this to learn life skills" and "I am suggesting that people do this to justify my claims". Ethics classes are recommended in the former context. Your "recommendation" that Pasha study things himself was in the latter context. You should just explain it, since you are the one making the claim, not demand he study it himself.
People are supposed to back up what they say here. "I want you to do it on your own" is a filibuster, not an honest argument.
You have confused the former for the later. I may not have written well enough and so be partly to blame for your misconception, but unless you have developed internet mind reading skills that allow you to identify motives that I am unaware of, I am confident I know my motives, and my separate claims, better than you.
My claim is that Pasha should learn life skill do this because it can be interesting, and with later elaboration, useful. This could fairly be characterized as "I am suggesting that people do this to learn life skills (that can be interesting and are useful)."
My suggestion of how Pasha should go about it, with the reasoning as to why elaborated after the post, is a claim of a way to avoid (and thus respect) his distrust of the institutional actors who normally teach the subject matter. This could be fairly characterized as "I am suggesting a specific way to learn life skill (that differs from a ways that you have indicated contempt for).
I am not claiming Pasha should do the [this] that was the subject of what I quoted when replying to him-
My claim is not that Pasha should do [this] to learn life skills anyway. Nor am I making a claim that he should keep trying until he finds one by a non-dimwit professor. Or that the busywork he was assigned in the past was secretly meaningful and he just missed the point.
My claim is that self-driven study of certain sub-fields (professional ethics) is a way to get better value (interest and useful insights) in a way that isn't a disliked medium (ethics class) taught by distrusted instructors (dimwit professors) and or with make-work (busywork). The 'assignment' proposed- noting different lines of emphasis, and how some professions deal with the blanket moral prohibitions espoused by others- does not require any writing or feedback to anyone else. It exists not to provide something to do for a grade, but provide relevant insights for how different professional cultures interact.
One, if you do not consider 'this subject matter can be interesting and professional useful, and this learning way avoids your concerns' an explanation for why to self-study study material, I would suggest you are too used to the motte's tendency for essay-length responses.
Two, it is not a demand. It is a suggestion, hence 'if you get a chance,' which allows him full discretion to refuse on any grounds he wants. The emphasis on his discretion may not have been clear enough due to the words used and the filtering effect of internet, but even then demands have an 'or else [consequence]' attached to the back end. The only [consequence] for not partaking is that he might lose the benefits of [interesting and useful insights] of partaking.
No, it is not. On two fronts.
One, a short argument is not a filibuster.
The argument provided may have been too short of an argument. The argument may have been unclear, and used poor choices of word to seem more of a demand than it was. But recommendations with short supporting arguments and no time commitment are about as far from a filibuster argument as one can get.
Two, 'I want you to do it on your own' is an honest argument if it I honestly think he would enjoy and benefit more from doing it on his own and I want him to have that benefit.
Pasha seems highly skeptical of the university format- a format generally meant to guide students rather than have them do it on their own. Moreover, he has built this from personal experience. One can sincerely believe he would both enjoy the material more and be in a mindset to learn specific lessons if he engaged it on his own volition, in a more targeted nature, on their own spare time, rather than be compelled to (i.e. from a demand from dim-wit professors) in a time-constrained environment (university with competing classes).
Your argument is "to find out why it's useful, go do it yourself". That is neither short, nor has no time commitment. The sentence may be short, but reading the sentence is not enough to see the whole argument; the rest of your argument is hidden behind the time commitment.
Again, that's the difference between "do it to gain a benefit" and "do it to see the explanation". You are proposing that he go through an entire field of study in order to see the justification for your claim. This is unreasonable. If you make a claim, justify it. It doesn't matter how much he'd benefit from it, you should be willing to back up what you are saying.
It's also bizarre to suddenly give life advice in the middle of an argument with someone over the Internet. Clearly you told him to do that as part of the argument, not because you have a habit of giving random advice to strangers.
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Before we continue this discussion, I believe you should read all 7 Harry Potter books. I also believe you should read the Bible and the Torah. I believe you should read the Dead Sea Scrolls. I believe you should have an AI translate all 7 Harry Potter books into Swahili and read them again. Learn Swahili first if you have to, time is apparently no object. I believe you should read every word ever written by Thomas Aquinas. I believe you should re-read them, but this time reinterpret them as the works of Thomas Aquinas's black trans lesbian housekeeper, plagiarized without credit.
I think you're operating under a misconception. You seem to think I disagree with the concept of reading things. I do not. My point of contention with you is that you are not making any actual arguments in favor of your position. Telling people to read more books is not an argument.
It's not that I don't know enough about ethics, or that I haven't considered the possibility that other people might believe different things than me. My point is very simple: If you're here to make an argument, then make it. If you're not here to make an argument then you should at least stop trying to give people homework.
The presumption that the only reason anyone might disagree with you is that they haven't done enough research is not charming.
Don’t be a tool.
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Since you seem to desire to continue this discussion regardless of your requested pause, I'll be happy to indulge you just once more before honoring your requested pause for the Swahili translation step.
Which surprisingly is the only one I haven't already done. (Well, mostly. I don't think there's an authoritative word count for Aquinas.)
I will start by noting that you have retreated from the earlier bailey. I am happy for you to abandon prior arguments about midwit professors, defending blood sacrifice, and other arguments I did not make. I will be interested if your next / last post in this exchange abandons any more strawmen arguments I did not make.
Disagree with the concept of reading? Heavens no. I just think you had a bit of a reading comprehension failure.
I suspect you believed it was advocating some sort view that ethics reading would/should change one's own ethics, hence you emphasis in response two that no reading would change your moral worldview, as if that was an objective.
I also think you also thought I was advocating dimwit-professor-led ethics classes, hence your repeated reference to the dimwits characterization, until response three after your (hopefully) accidental almost-insinuation against Pasha was teased.
I also think you completely missed the point that recommending self-pursued reading outside of a university class format is a complete non-advocacy for, well, university-level ethics classes.
Further, my conception of you is that you are doubling down in a you-won't-admit-it's-embarrassment defensiveness and are trying to claim some rhetorical moral high ground after your earlier mistakes were teased. You are attempting to reposition to an argument about making unreasonable demands, despite no demands having been made of Pasha, by using a ironic-equivalence of a raising learning Swahili as a precondition for further discussion. A language whose only relevance to the discussion is to demonstrate the difficulty of unreasonable demands. Since clearly learning Swahili is as relevant, and as unreasonable, a precondition for addressing provided arguments as...
...checks notes...
...recommending someone read about a potentially interesting and useful subject in a way that avoids a medium and format they have said they don't trust.
Checks out.
If your point was simply about homework, you would have talked about homework from the start, rather than spending the first two responses talking about blood sacrifices and the strength of your convictions and dimwit professors.
But hey. It's still the internet. Being called out can be embarrassing, even more so than leaving with out the last word. In fact, I'll even give you a hand with some counter arguments you could leave off with.
You could argue that you did not actually miss the argument, but that it was not long enough, even though there's no requirement for how long an argument needs to be in a short post. You could argue that you were requesting an elaboration of the argument, which I unfairly did not provide, despite you not asking for a longer argument. You could even argue that you didn't misunderstand the argument at all, truly.
But for your pending last word, I would suggest that 'you did not make an argument' falls a little flat after three iterations of the argument have been provided, and then had it's presence ignored even after being re-posted and bolded for emphasis. That would be just a tad embarrassing to end off on.
Especially if you were so predictable as to do it after being predicted you would try for the last word.
Farewell. I'll not respond until after I learn Swahili, so consider any last word yours.
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