[ExI] About bullet-swallowing

[Stefano Vaj]

On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 4:01 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 23/05/2008, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> To illustrate:
> (a) torturing people is bad;
> (b) if increasing the sum total of human unhappiness is bad, then
> torturing people is bad.
> Tempting though it is to affirm (a) as an absolute truth on a par with
> scientific truths, it's wrong to do so. On the other hand, (b) is OK.
>

Yes. In ethics, aesthetics and politics, sillogisms are fine and may be as
"true" as sillogisms regarding statements of facts.

OTOH, it is similarly required that the premise is accepted and the
inference correct, so that ultimately this means that while you can hardly
have true logical arguments "ad rem", you may or may not having arguments ad
hominem, depending on whom you are communicating with.

Stefano Vaj
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