Scott Alexander on the distinction between axiology and morality

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DarlBundren
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Scott Alexander on the distinction between axiology and morality

Post by DarlBundren »

Scott Alexander has recently written an article on the distinction between axiology and morality (and law).

According to him, axiology is about what's good, while morality is about how to be good. He states that - hard-core utilitarians aside - we all draw a distinction between axiology and morality. For example, axiology says that there's not much difference between murdering someone and not donating money to save a child in Africa. Morality, on the other hand, draws a strong distinction: Not-murdering is obligatory; donating is superogatory. If you defy axiology, you make the world worse. If you defy morality, you make the world worse, you feel guilty, and you betray the social trust that lets your community function smoothly. According to this view, most “moral dilemmas” are philosophers trying to create perverse situations where axiology and morality give opposite answers.

He also uses meat-eating as one of his examples:
Scott Alexander wrote:Eating meat doesn’t violate any moral laws either. Again, it makes the world a worse place. But there aren’t any bonds of trust between humans and animals, nobody’s expecting you not to eat meat, there aren’t any written or unwritten codes saying you shouldn’t. So eat the meat and offset it by making the world better in some other way.
But he's also quick to point out that this only works outside your vegan community. Vegans, according to him, are more or less turning an axiological stance into a moral one.

He then adds:
Scott Alexander wrote:Murdering someone does violate a moral law. The problem with murder isn’t just that it creates a world in which one extra person is dead. [...]and the problem isn’t just that it has some knock-on effects in terms of making people afraid of crime, or decreasing the level of social trust by 23.5 social-trustons, or whatever.[...]we’re crossing a Schelling fence, breaking rules, and weakening the whole moral edifice. The cost isn’t infinite, but it’s pretty hard to calculate. If we’re positing some ridiculous offset that obviously outweighs any possible cost – maybe go back to the example of curing all cancer forever – then whatever, go ahead. If it’s anything less than that, be careful
What do you think? Do you consider it to be a useful distinction? I have always thought that not pushing the fat man in the trolley problem was just a pragmatical decision. You don't push him because you don't want to live in a society where people can kill you at any moment.This distinction basically tells you the same, but it looks even more practical and systematic. You don't push the man unless it's really, really worth it. (And - maybe - you eat a vegan diet, but you don't throw red paint at people unless there's a lot to gain from it)

Any thoughts?
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Re: Scott Alexander on the distinction between axiology and morality

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Yea moral skepticism all the way baby! As long as it's in service of a higher order aesthetic.

It's like what you said about not advising people to do face to face altruism, you might have hit upon consequentialism because it appeals to your interest to calculate every decision in a detached manner, but rule consequentialists also try to absorb virtues and duties, what's at the core is the will to power, it's only the will that can get you do anything, what appeals people to duties is it's agent based, so they have a justification to do more varied stuff and call it all ethics, but it's not for everyone and if it's not conducive to societal flourishing it should be discarded, same with moral skepticism in the fatalist weak willed.

Contra Askell On Moral Offsets
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/

Course Notes on Anscombe (Daniel Kaufman)
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3423
The immediately striking difference between the two versions is that the Aristotelian describes the situation with terms that are what I will call axiologically thick – meaning that they have evaluative connotations. To “supply” someone, in the context of commerce, is to do something that incurs a debt and to “promise” to pay is to acknowledge this and accept it, entailing, as a result, that the person in question “owes” something to the supplier. To fail to pay someone, when one “owes” him is what it means to be a “deadbeat,” and paying one’s debts is part of what it means to be an “honorable man.”
Course Notes on H.A. Prichard. (Kaufman)
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3413

Ethics, Criteria, and Moral “Thickness” (Daniel Kaufman)
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3412

Intuition and Morals (Daniel A. Kaufman)
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3409

Stirner and the Politics of the Ego (Saul Newman)
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3416
. . .Stirner’s egoism, and his use of the war metaphor, is more about achieving power over oneself—through the idea of ownness—than power over others. As to the second criticism, I have argued that it is precisely through Stirner’s rejection of essence and totality that we are able to engage in political action. Stirner has opened up a theoretical space for politics that was hitherto confined by the limits of essentialism and rationality. His critique of human essence has enabled us to theorize a political identity that is contingent and open to reinvention by the individual. So rather than classical anarchism, with its Enlightenment humanist paradigm of essence, being the way forward as Clark argues, it is precisely this paradigm that holds us back, theoretically and politically. Stirner’s fundamental break with this paradigm allows us to reinvent politics in ways that are not limited by essence.
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Re: Scott Alexander on the distinction between axiology and morality

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DarlBundren wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:38 pm According to him, axiology is about what's good, while morality is about how to be good. He states that - hard-core utilitarians aside - we all draw a distinction between axiology and morality.
No, only relativists and deontologists can draw such a distinction, and even most of them won't because they won't necessarily agree on points of axiology; for a relativist at least the claim that one state of the world is any better than another is going to seem subjective or meaningless.
Consequentialists don't and can't draw any such distinction by nature.
Most philosophers agree that consequentialism is the right way of looking at normative ethics. Most people are simply inconsistent on the topic and don't agree on anything except with moral universalism (without being able to agree on what that is).

He's saying we all draw this distinction, painting a picture of broad consensus, but the reality is he's describing a picture of morality (when he defines it) that amounts to cultural relativism and social contract: virtually nobody agrees with that interpretation. So, if he's appealing to popularity he has to scrap that and go back to normative ethics.

He sounds like somebody who took one too many cultural anthropology classes and had relativism drilled into him, then skipped philosophy.
(EDIT: Apparently he took philosophy, I don't know what compelled him to favor cultural relativism since I've only seen this level of insistence from cultural anthropologists in the past)
DarlBundren wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:38 pmFor example, axiology says that there's not much difference between murdering someone and not donating money to save a child in Africa.
No, there's quite a bit of difference. In the very least, as a matter of social order, murdering somebody has set off a necessary chain reaction of police work, court proceedings, and punishment that are all very expensive -- enough to save a lot of starving children if the money was better used.

The problem with consequentialism is that most people ignore most of the consequences; that probably goes more for the critics than the practitioners, but practitioners can be at fault too when biases are present. That's why rule consequentialism is probably more useful for most people.
DarlBundren wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:38 pmMorality, on the other hand, draws a strong distinction: Not-murdering is obligatory; donating is superogatory.
Law draws a distinction, and we need law. Even if it's the right thing to do to murder an evil person before he commits a terrible crime (if you know it will happen), you still have to be punished because there's no way for anybody to determine you acted correctly and preserve social order, and that's part of the consequences.
Scott Alexander wrote:Eating meat doesn’t violate any moral laws either.
It doesn't violate social contract, it doesn't mean that it's not immoral if it's setting off a chain of events that harms sentient beings.
Scott Alexander wrote:Again, it makes the world a worse place.
Something a moral person should care about.
Scott Alexander wrote:But there aren’t any bonds of trust between humans and animals, nobody’s expecting you not to eat meat, there aren’t any written or unwritten codes saying you shouldn’t. So eat the meat and offset it by making the world better in some other way.
Thanks to biases, you should always prefer to abstain from harm rather than attempt to offset that harm after the fact. It is very difficult to precisely offset anything, and the vast majority of people are going to take something like that to mean donate $20 to an animal shelter for the year with no notion of the insignificant effect that has on animal suffering compared to their actions of purchasing meat.

The most precise cancellation of the effect of eating meat would be to stop somebody else from eating it. And in doing that, you're either violating social contract, or convincing the person to stop with an argument. And if you're convincing that person with an argument, and that person has decided as a moral agent to abstain, you're instigating a moral ponzi scheme; claiming credit for that person's moral choices as a copout for your own bad ones. It's an act of existential theft and dishonesty, because that person is doing nothing moral at all by abstaining from meat if it is enabling you to eat more of it where you otherwise would not have.

Put simply, abstain first from doing harm where you are doing harm to the best of your ability; in the case of meat, this is relatively easy and gives you pretty much the biggest moral bang for your buck of any practicable action. After you have done your best to avoid harm, then look to do even better by doing good and making the world better in other ways.
DarlBundren wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:38 pmBut he's also quick to point out that this only works outside your vegan community. Vegans, according to him, are more or less turning an axiological stance into a moral one.
True to form for a cultural relativist.
Scott Alexander wrote:Murdering someone does violate a moral law. The problem with murder isn’t just that it creates a world in which one extra person is dead. [...]and the problem isn’t just that it has some knock-on effects in terms of making people afraid of crime, or decreasing the level of social trust by 23.5 social-trustons, or whatever.[...]
No, it's not just whatever. There are profound and immediate costs to yourself and society -- necessary costs to any violation of social contract. Actually account for those and take into account opportunity cost as well, and breaking the law is a very very bad idea for any but the most extreme good consequences.
Scott Alexander wrote:The cost isn’t infinite, but it’s pretty hard to calculate. If we’re positing some ridiculous offset that obviously outweighs any possible cost – maybe go back to the example of curing all cancer forever – then whatever, go ahead. If it’s anything less than that, be careful
That's the point of rule consequentialism. You don't need to muddy the waters with cultural relativism to figure that out.

DarlBundren wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:38 pmWhat do you think? Do you consider it to be a useful distinction?
You can probably guess by the above, but no. While I love introducing new words and concepts because they usually help with understanding, axiology isn't particularly useful to talk about. It's already subsumed into pretty much any discussion of normative ethics.
DarlBundren wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:38 pmI have always thought that not pushing the fat man in the trolley problem was just a pragmatical decision. You don't push him because you don't want to live in a society where people can kill you at any moment.This distinction basically tells you the same, but it looks even more practical and systematic. You don't push the man unless it's really, really worth it. (And - maybe - you eat a vegan diet, but you don't throw red paint at people unless there's a lot to gain from it)
That's fine in terms of rule consequentialism, but his meta-ethics are bad, and his claims that eating (or I would say buying) meat is not immoral are bunk.
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Re: Scott Alexander on the distinction between axiology and morality

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brimstoneSalad wrote:He sounds like somebody who took one too many cultural anthropology classes and had relativism drilled into him, then skipped philosophy.
I don’t want to speak on his behalf or anything like that, but I doubt he’s a cultural relativist. I think he simply meant that most people don’t consider murdering someone and avoiding to save someone to be the same thing. Which, I think is a reasonable descriptive claim if you don’t happen to live at the Oxford centre for practical ethics.
brimstoneSalad wrote: No, there's quite a bit of difference. In the very least, as a matter of social order, murdering somebody has set off a necessary chain reaction of police work, court proceedings, and punishment that are all very expensive -- enough to save a lot of starving children if the money was better used.
 
I think that if we consider it as a matter of social order, we’re speaking of what he termed morality. Using this stricter definition, morality is axiology applied to a specific social context. Which, I don’t think is cultural relativism. He doesn’t state that – all things being equal – in one culture cannibalism is OK, but in another is not. It says that in order to behave morally we should take into consideration the context in which we operate. You think that we don’t need another word for that because taking into consideration social variables is already part of morality. He thinks that these concepts stay separate because they each make different compromises between goodness, implementation, and coordination. According to him:
Even utilitarians who deny this distinction in principle will use it in everyday life: if their friend was considering not donating money, they would be a little upset; if their friend was considering murder, they would be horrified. If they themselves forgot to donate money, they’d feel a little bad; if they committed murder in the heat of passion, they’d feel awful.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Thanks to biases, you should always prefer to abstain from harm rather than attempt to offset that harm after the fact. It is very difficult to precisely offset anything, and the vast majority of people are going to take something like that to mean donate $20 to an animal shelter for the year with no notion of the insignificant effect that has on animal suffering compared to their actions of purchasing meat.
Yes, I agree. I think he agrees as well to some extent. His post was a way to support Askell’s opinion that:
in the actual world, we are – at best – morally permitted to offset trivial immoral actions, but that more serious immoral actions are almost always not the sorts of things we can morally offset.

However, for some reason (because there’s no social stigma attached to it, probably) he considers meat-eating as something whose harm you can offset. To me, it’s clearly one of those situations where something small (not being able to eat a steak and being called a tree-hugger) can make a huge difference.

brimstoneSalad wrote:True to form for a cultural relativist.
Again, I don’t think that’s cultural relativism. He’s saying that there’s no stigma attached to it outside the vegan community. Which, unfortunately, is true.
brimstoneSalad wrote: breaking the law is a very very bad idea for any but the most extreme good consequences.
He’s saying that murdering someone breaks both the law and the moral edifice. The same thing – according to him – doesn’t apply to things people don’t expect you to do.

However, he then he goes on to say that donating 10% of your income to charity (something that he does) is a matter of morality rather than axiology (“axiology tells you to donate ALL your money”), which strikes me as odd. Yes, it's a normative claim, but literally no one expects you to donate that kind of money to charity.
brimstoneSalad wrote:That's the point of rule consequentialism. You don't need to muddy the waters with cultural relativism to figure that out.
He admits that’s rule consequentialism:

At least from a rule-utilitarianesque perspective, morality is an attempt to triage the infinite demands of axiology, in order to make them implementable by specific people living in specific communities.
And according to that definition:
Emitting carbon doesn’t violate any moral law at all (in the stricter sense of morality used above). It does make the world a worse place. But there’s no unspoken social agreement not to do it, it doesn’t violate any codes, nobody’s going to lose trust in you because of it, you’re not making the community any less cohesive. If you make the world a worse place, it’s perfectly fine to compensate by making the world a better place. So pay to clean up some carbon, or donate to help children in Uganda with parasitic worms, or whatever.

I don’t know. I think his distinction can be useful to help people understand that social trust is important and that you should break it only if it’s really worth it (it would be a good way to explain when civil disobedience is permissible, for example). It’s basically the reason why I’m in favor of pragmatic, moderate activism.

On the other hand, I don’t agree with some of the examples he gives. Like this one:
 axiology tells us a world without alcohol would be better than our current world: ending alcoholism could avert millions of deaths, illnesses, crimes, and abusive relationships. Morality only tells us that we should be careful drinking and stop if we find ourselves becoming alcoholic or ruining our relationships. And the law protests that it tried banning alcohol once, but it turned out to be unenforceable and gave too many new opportunities to organized crime, so it’s going to stay out of this one except to say you shouldn’t drink and drive.
What he considers to be axiology here, looks like short-sighted morality to me.
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Re: Scott Alexander on the distinction between axiology and morality

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DarlBundren wrote: Fri Sep 08, 2017 5:25 am I don’t want to speak on his behalf or anything like that, but I doubt he’s a cultural relativist. I think he simply meant that most people don’t consider murdering someone and avoiding to save someone to be the same thing. Which, I think is a reasonable descriptive claim if you don’t happen to live at the Oxford centre for practical ethics.
Well, it's not the same thing in consequential terms at all, you just have to look at all of the consequences. Putting actions in bubbles is what causes the disconnect.
I think the clear indication of relativism comes from him saying that in a vegan group eating meat becomes immoral. He doesn't seem to define morality on any universalist terms, where he did define it it was very culturally relativistic.
DarlBundren wrote: Fri Sep 08, 2017 5:25 am I think that if we consider it as a matter of social order, we’re speaking of what he termed morality.
He's using some mishmash of social contract and cultural relativism. The thing is, you can't separate social order from the "axiology" because it has clear utility.
DarlBundren wrote: Fri Sep 08, 2017 5:25 am He doesn’t state that – all things being equal – in one culture cannibalism is OK, but in another is not.
He pretty much did, though. Not with that example, but with the others. You can directly substitute in cannibalism for eating meat, in a culture where the former is accepted (just make sure you're eating disenfranchised people or people from other tribes, or criminals or the very old or dead).
DarlBundren wrote: Fri Sep 08, 2017 5:25 am You think that we don’t need another word for that because taking into consideration social variables is already part of morality. He thinks that these concepts stay separate because they each make different compromises between goodness, implementation, and coordination. According to him:
Even utilitarians who deny this distinction in principle will use it in everyday life: if their friend was considering not donating money, they would be a little upset; if their friend was considering murder, they would be horrified. If they themselves forgot to donate money, they’d feel a little bad; if they committed murder in the heat of passion, they’d feel awful.
This just seems like him not thinking about these issues very carefully and jumping to conclusions about consequentialists (which he thinks are all utilitarians?).
DarlBundren wrote: Fri Sep 08, 2017 5:25 am Again, I don’t think that’s cultural relativism. He’s saying that there’s no stigma attached to it outside the vegan community. Which, unfortunately, is true.
He wasn't just talking about stigma, he was saying the difference literally makes it immoral or morally acceptable to do. That's cultural relativism.
And he's not saying it's because of the harm that comes from the stigma either; he has already recognized the harm in axiology.
DarlBundren wrote: Fri Sep 08, 2017 5:25 am However, he then he goes on to say that donating 10% of your income to charity (something that he does) is a matter of morality rather than axiology (“axiology tells you to donate ALL your money”), which strikes me as odd. Yes, it's a normative claim, but literally no one expects you to donate that kind of money to charity.
That's pretty inconsistent.
DarlBundren wrote: Fri Sep 08, 2017 5:25 am
brimstoneSalad wrote:That's the point of rule consequentialism. You don't need to muddy the waters with cultural relativism to figure that out.
He admits that’s rule consequentialism:

At least from a rule-utilitarianesque perspective, morality is an attempt to triage the infinite demands of axiology, in order to make them implementable by specific people living in specific communities.
I don't think he correctly understands what rule consequentialism is.
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Re: Scott Alexander on the distinction between axiology and morality

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brimstoneSalad wrote:He wasn't just talking about stigma, he was saying the difference literally makes it immoral or morally acceptable to do. That's cultural relativism.
Well, it boils down to this. That’s not the way I read it. I think that he recognizes that vegetarianism is good. He even went on to say that he’d be willing to pay 500$ a year not to be vegetarian, as he’s willing to donate 10% of his income to charity. He believes that these are supererogatory acts though, and that there would be no social stigma attached to not doing them. He adds:
In these healthy situations, the universally-agreed priority is that law trumps morality, and morality trumps axiology. First, because you can’t keep your obligations to your community from jail, and you can’t work to make the world a better place when you’re a universally-loathed social outcast. But also, because you can’t work to build strong communities and relationships in the middle of a civil war, and you can’t work to make the world a better place from within a low-trust defect-defect equilibrium

That's how I read it, but maybe I'm wrong. The only way to find out would be to ask him, I guess.
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Re: Scott Alexander on the distinction between axiology and morality

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I do not see any other way to read this other than a pretty explicit statement of cultural relativism:
Scott Alexander wrote:Eating meat doesn’t violate any moral laws either. Again, it makes the world a worse place. But there aren’t any bonds of trust between humans and animals, nobody’s expecting you not to eat meat, there aren’t any written or unwritten codes saying you shouldn’t. So eat the meat and offset it by making the world better in some other way.
DarlBundren wrote: Sat Sep 09, 2017 9:55 am He even went on to say that he’d be willing to pay 500$ a year not to be vegetarian, as he’s willing to donate 10% of his income to charity.
To ease his cognitive dissonance, perhaps, but that's pretty much all he's doing.

I don't doubt that it's possible in theory to offset that any more than it's possible to offset murder or anything else, but it's a serious problem to engage in harmful behavior with the mind only to offset it rather than reduce and avoid the harm, it's always going to be easier to prevent a harm than remedy it, and the idea that we even have the data to fully calculate the harm and put a number to it is silly.
There are diminishing returns to reparative actions and only so much we can practicably do. To think that $500 (less than $2 a day) is all it takes when you're advocating for people to continue to eat meat and do just as much damage and then compete for the limited low hanging fruit of reducing other damages is naïve at best.
He would do less harm if he would just admit, like Richard Dawkins, that what he's doing is ethically indefensible. A normal biased person couldn't hope to honestly calculate a compensation for the intensely harmful actions he or she wants to engage in for personal pleasure.

How does he think he's getting to this number or anything close to it? I can think of a few flawed approaches:

1. The cheapest and only plausible way to a number that low is to try to convince other people to go vegan instead, which is affordable but not ethically sound; you're doing it on the basis of a lie and engaging in theft of the moral good those people have decided of their own will to do unknowing that their going vegan is causing you to eat meat thus leaving them still with the burden of going "double vegan" (impossible) if they want to cancel their own harm. This is good they own, you can't just scapegoat by putting your harm on them and claim the good they do as your returns in a moral ponzi or pyramid scheme.

2. The only other option to reduce animal harm is to support something like "clean meat" (in vitro meat) and get it to market faster. This is a great endeavor, but very speculative. Nobody knows how far $500, $5,000, or even 5 million could go in bringing it to market that many days or seconds early. It's a wild guess, and not suitable as a cop-out for continuing to do harm in the mean time. It's not much better than Christians saying they're helping to bring about the second coming and then all of this climate stuff won't matter. It may not even ever happen, we just don't know.

3. You can try to offset suffering between different species, and pay the exorbitant amount it costs to relieve human suffering today in the same amounts. $500 won't cut it, try a half a million and you can get closer to a direct substitution. Maybe Bill Gates can do this, but I don't think Scott has the funds. And this isn't even necessarily doing good in the world, just breaking even.

4. You can try to offset the suffering by causing pleasure for others, say giving out millions of free hand jobs. The exchange rate there is pretty speculative, though. How much pleasure would it take to be worth going through the tormented life of a farmed animal and then be killed? I don't think we can quantify that in orgasms at all, or it would be astronomical, and I think any attempt to put a number to that is ridiculous.
DarlBundren wrote: Sat Sep 09, 2017 9:55 am He believes that these are supererogatory acts though, and that there would be no social stigma attached to not doing them. He adds:
Just because there's no social stigma doesn't mean it isn't still immoral. Slavery had no social stigma in the past, yet that didn't make it a moral practice. The only way you can regard it as such is cultural relativism, or if you go back far enough and limit the scope of slavery you're talking about, pragmatism (this doesn't apply to animal agriculture in the developed world, he knows this).
Scott Alexander wrote:In these healthy situations, the universally-agreed priority is that law trumps morality, and morality trumps axiology.
People do not universally agree that morality is culturally relative. So, his whole house of cards breaks down.

He claims that people agree that morality is different from axiology therefore morality is culturally relative, but philosophers who have actually studied the issue mainly disagree with the first point (he seems to dismiss philosophy with some disdain), and people almost universally disagree with that conclusion that morality is culturally relative so there's some problem in his reasoning here. People are only inconsistent with their moral beliefs because they try to mix deontology and consequentialism. In no sense does that mean relativism is right, because when confronted and explained the contradiction people tend to favor consequentialism (note how most philosophers gravitate in that direction).
Scott Alexander wrote:First, because you can’t keep your obligations to your community from jail, and you can’t work to make the world a better place when you’re a universally-loathed social outcast. But also, because you can’t work to build strong communities and relationships in the middle of a civil war, and you can’t work to make the world a better place from within a low-trust defect-defect equilibrium
These are all long game consequentialist arguments. Axiology is not the issue; it's just not short sighted consequentialism (which nobody is advocating).
Careful thought on morality indicates all of these things. Scott is battling a short sighted straw man and asserting his wrong conclusions on that basis.
DarlBundren wrote: Sat Sep 09, 2017 9:55 am That's how I read it, but maybe I'm wrong. The only way to find out would be to ask him, I guess.
Like most people, he's just being inconsistent and trying to rationalize what he wants to do so he doesn't have to feel bad about it.
I doubt he would come here to discuss this or address these arguments on his blog, but I guess it can't hurt to let him know it's being discussed.
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