Old steel-manning and interpreting

Main entry: NameTheTrait

Steel-Manning and Interpreting NTT

Regarding the written version

The NTT argument contains ambiguous language such as the use of ' would cause us to deem ourselves valueless. ' in P2, with no clear meaning as to what is and is not ' us '. In this section we will consider the possible interpretations of such statements and demonstrate how each fail, and explain the interpretation we will use for the debunk in first order logic.

To illustrate our points, in this section we will use an analogous situation wherein we substitute ' humans are of moral value ' for ' I am of moral value ' and demonstrate how NTT would fail to establish moral value in a cow which we will call Bessie (who is not you). This is motivated by some of the analogies Isaac has given in attempts to demonstrate how P1 & P2 lead to the conclusion, and because it avoids some of the issues associated with quantifying over all humans and all animals, who each have a variety of traits. Here we will take P1 to be ' P1 - I am of moral value ' and C to be ' C - Bessie is of moral value ' , and look at possible interpretations of P2 and show how they fail to lead to the conclusion.

Suppose we were to take

P2 - There is no trait absent in Bessie which if absent in me would cause me to deem myself valueless.

This simply makes P2 vacuously true, since P1 says I can never be valueless, hence there can be no trait that could cause me to be valueless. Making P2 irrelevant, and the argument a non-sequitur. There is also another issue here, and that is that there is a difference between a trait that if absent in me would cause me to deem myself valueless , and a trait that if absent in me would cause me to actually be valueless . The distinction is that the former is a matter of perspective and the latter is a is a statement of fact, just because you have considered something as such does not necessarily make something so, and even if it did, failing to deem something morally valueless does not even mean it has been deemed to have moral value. If we allow the use of deem, we have; P1 is an assertion of fact, P2 of perspective, P3 of fact. So for the remaining interpretations we will omit the use of deem.

To avoid the issue of P2 becoming vacuously true, we will introduce the notion of a clone. Such that P2 is stated as

P2 - There is no trait absent in Bessie and present in me, which if absent in a clone of me would cause the clone to be valueless.

This is essentially the form we will be using for the debunk in first order logic, the notion of the clone solves the issue associated with P1, since now there is nothing to say the clone can never be valueless. We are simply assessing whether or not the clone, with the trait removed, has moral value. This is a fairly reasonably steel-man that doesn't stray too far from the written argument. The reason this fails is because we can simply say the clone has moral value, and this will imply nothing about whether or not Bessie has moral value. This is because they are two different individuals, so we can simply have completely different moral standards them.

Note: if the trait 'being Bessie' is absent in you, then removing a trait, cannot cause the clone to become Bessie, see 'Showing NTT fails for disjoint sets in general'

To see why subsequent verbal versions presented by Ask Yourself fail see Subsequent Verbal Versions of NTT