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Injecting legal definitions into an informal conversation is a cheap debater's trick, annoying, and and hijacks the conversation.

by _jal 9y ago

matthewmacleod 9y ago
It's not semantic, or a legal definition. It's a very explicit and important difference – 'evasion' is illegally avoiding taxation, and 'avoidance' is legally avoiding taxation. Messing these two different concepts up helps nobody and just muddles the two issues further. Avoidance is a problem that must be tackled on a global scale; but first, we have to be honest about what it is.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  > It's a very explicit and important difference It's a mere technicality. Important in a court of law - sure. Not important when discussing ethical implication of not paying taxes in the context of HN.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    > Not important when discussing ethical implication of not paying taxes in the context of HN. Legal definitions are not important for discussing ethical implications? This is a wildly unsubstantiated claim that you’re positing without any compelling argument behind it. What you’re saying is implicitly tantamount to saying a discussion of legislation is irrelevant in a discussion of ethics. Doing that literally dismisses entire schools of ethical philosophy. You don’t have to agree with legal definitions a priori, just like you don’t need to agree with particular ethical arguments. But you absolutely need to consider them for a well reasoned discussion about ethics. The legal definitions are there precisely because of past ethical discussions - legislative arguments are, categorically, ethical arguments. In fact, you could define legislation as the implementation of an ethical specification.
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
      Have to disagree. Laws may have something like an ethical base, but only as a nod to practicality - people have to believe in them. They are pragmatic to the core. Sure, there are ethical schools of pragmatism, and we surely include them in our ethical discussions (trolley car problems etc) but how the law lands on the trolley car is NOT any sort of arbiter of ethics?
      - dsacco 9y ago
        > Sure, there are ethical schools of pragmatism, and we surely include them in our ethical discussions (trolley car problems etc) but how the law lands on the trolley car is NOT any sort of arbiter of ethics? So you’re not disagreeing then. We’re saying the same thing: legal definitions are relevant and should be included in discussion, but they do not have to be agreed with because are not intrinsically correct. I didn’t ask the parent comment for agreement with legislation, I asked for acknowledgement in an ethical discussion because it’s relevant.
        JoeAltmaier 9y ago
        Relevant to lawyers. The ethical discussion is completely possible sans any mention of regulation.
- buttcoinslol 9y ago
  When you have enough money to influence the people who make the tax rules, what is it then? Avoidance or evasion?
dsacco 9y ago
You find the introduction of definitional precision to be an annoying, cheap trick? What exactly are you achieving if you don’t rigorously define your terms and agree upon them? You make it sound like insisting on that is just a method of sophistry, but it’s the foundation of human communication. We cannot possibly talk about anything in a productive way if we’re not being precise in our terminology. Nuance and context have a meaningful impact on our conclusions, and legal definitions aren’t pointless. You can debate the merits of those definitions, but to hand wave them away because the conversation is “informal” is silly. It is objectively false and unproductive to conflate tax avoidance and tax evasion. If you have a disagreement about the ethics of tax avoidance and believe it is meaningfully similar to tax evasion, that argument can certainly be made. But it is a legitimate point that tax avoidance is a separate thing from tax evasion. If you want to challenge that, you need to essentially debate the axiomatic legal foundations - i.e. do you find the relevant legislation unethical? Do you think tax avoidance is a net negative even if it’s illegal? Etc. The legal context isn’t pedantry, it’s intrinsically relevant to the topic. On the other hand, what you’re doing is dismissing an attempt at precision, which actually bypasses attempts to have these very legitimate debates. No conversation has been hijacked here. Moreover, even if you call this an “informal conversation”, it will persuade people to change their opinions or reinforce them in a meaningful way. You cannot avoid that reality by temporarily surrendering rigor and selectively choosing what’s relevant to the topic. If you disagree with the legal distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion, make a compelling argument for it. But don’t dismiss a well established legal distinction without a commensurately compelling reason to do so.
- _jal 9y ago
  I see a ton of imprecision in technical discussions here daily, and that's a topic on which one would expect some expertise here. And yet the pedantry that receives is far less annoying than the inevitable tax avoidance cliche-rants. Why? Because there the pedantry is at least topical. Here, it is arguing language in order to grind an axe on a side issue almost completely unrelated to the Ikea founder.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    Natural language philosophy constitutes legitimate dialectics, not pedantry. In the former you add precision by first synthesizing an agreement of terminology and introducing relevant definitions. In the latter you argue against the meaning of a word instead of the intended meaning of the argument. In point of fact, it’s pedantic to dismiss an argument from legality on the grounds that it’s “legal” and not “ethical”, because legalislation (and more importantly the reasoning behind it) is a subset of ethics. A carefully considered discussion will include the existing literature that has come out of previously considered discussion; therefore it is fully reasonable to consider legal arguments in a discussion of ethics. To reiterate, you need not agree with legal arguments, but to call them pedantic or irrelevant is simply incorrect. They’re exceptionally topical.

Injecting legal definitions into an informal conversation is a cheap debater's trick, annoying, and and hijacks the conversation.

by _jal 9y ago

Injecting legal definitions into an informal conversation is a cheap debater's trick, annoying, and and hijacks the conversation.

matthewmacleod 9y ago

It's not semantic, or a legal definition. It's a very explicit and important difference – 'evasion' is illegally avoiding taxation, and 'avoidance' is legally avoiding taxation. Messing these two different concepts up helps nobody and just muddles the two issues further. Avoidance is a problem that must be tackled on a global scale; but first, we have to be honest about what it is.

eeZah7Ux 9y ago
> It's a very explicit and important difference It's a mere technicality. Important in a court of law - sure. Not important when discussing ethical implication of not paying taxes in the context of HN.
- dsacco 9y ago
  > Not important when discussing ethical implication of not paying taxes in the context of HN. Legal definitions are not important for discussing ethical implications? This is a wildly unsubstantiated claim that you’re positing without any compelling argument behind it. What you’re saying is implicitly tantamount to saying a discussion of legislation is irrelevant in a discussion of ethics. Doing that literally dismisses entire schools of ethical philosophy. You don’t have to agree with legal definitions a priori, just like you don’t need to agree with particular ethical arguments. But you absolutely need to consider them for a well reasoned discussion about ethics. The legal definitions are there precisely because of past ethical discussions - legislative arguments are, categorically, ethical arguments. In fact, you could define legislation as the implementation of an ethical specification.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Have to disagree. Laws may have something like an ethical base, but only as a nod to practicality - people have to believe in them. They are pragmatic to the core. Sure, there are ethical schools of pragmatism, and we surely include them in our ethical discussions (trolley car problems etc) but how the law lands on the trolley car is NOT any sort of arbiter of ethics?
    - dsacco 9y ago
      > Sure, there are ethical schools of pragmatism, and we surely include them in our ethical discussions (trolley car problems etc) but how the law lands on the trolley car is NOT any sort of arbiter of ethics? So you’re not disagreeing then. We’re saying the same thing: legal definitions are relevant and should be included in discussion, but they do not have to be agreed with because are not intrinsically correct. I didn’t ask the parent comment for agreement with legislation, I asked for acknowledgement in an ethical discussion because it’s relevant.
      - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
        Relevant to lawyers. The ethical discussion is completely possible sans any mention of regulation.
buttcoinslol 9y ago
When you have enough money to influence the people who make the tax rules, what is it then? Avoidance or evasion?

dsacco 9y ago

You find the introduction of definitional precision to be an annoying, cheap trick? What exactly are you achieving if you don’t rigorously define your terms and agree upon them? You make it sound like insisting on that is just a method of sophistry, but it’s the foundation of human communication. We cannot possibly talk about anything in a productive way if we’re not being precise in our terminology. Nuance and context have a meaningful impact on our conclusions, and legal definitions aren’t pointless. You can debate the merits of those definitions, but to hand wave them away because the conversation is “informal” is silly. It is objectively false and unproductive to conflate tax avoidance and tax evasion. If you have a disagreement about the ethics of tax avoidance and believe it is meaningfully similar to tax evasion, that argument can certainly be made. But it is a legitimate point that tax avoidance is a separate thing from tax evasion. If you want to challenge that, you need to essentially debate the axiomatic legal foundations - i.e. do you find the relevant legislation unethical? Do you think tax avoidance is a net negative even if it’s illegal? Etc. The legal context isn’t pedantry, it’s intrinsically relevant to the topic. On the other hand, what you’re doing is dismissing an attempt at precision, which actually bypasses attempts to have these very legitimate debates. No conversation has been hijacked here. Moreover, even if you call this an “informal conversation”, it will persuade people to change their opinions or reinforce them in a meaningful way. You cannot avoid that reality by temporarily surrendering rigor and selectively choosing what’s relevant to the topic. If you disagree with the legal distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion, make a compelling argument for it. But don’t dismiss a well established legal distinction without a commensurately compelling reason to do so.

_jal 9y ago
I see a ton of imprecision in technical discussions here daily, and that's a topic on which one would expect some expertise here. And yet the pedantry that receives is far less annoying than the inevitable tax avoidance cliche-rants. Why? Because there the pedantry is at least topical. Here, it is arguing language in order to grind an axe on a side issue almost completely unrelated to the Ikea founder.
- dsacco 9y ago
  Natural language philosophy constitutes legitimate dialectics, not pedantry. In the former you add precision by first synthesizing an agreement of terminology and introducing relevant definitions. In the latter you argue against the meaning of a word instead of the intended meaning of the argument. In point of fact, it’s pedantic to dismiss an argument from legality on the grounds that it’s “legal” and not “ethical”, because legalislation (and more importantly the reasoning behind it) is a subset of ethics. A carefully considered discussion will include the existing literature that has come out of previously considered discussion; therefore it is fully reasonable to consider legal arguments in a discussion of ethics. To reiterate, you need not agree with legal arguments, but to call them pedantic or irrelevant is simply incorrect. They’re exceptionally topical.