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The failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right. If you assume they're failures, they don't ha
by randallsquared 16y ago
The failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right.
If you assume they're failures, they don't have much bearing. If, however, you assume that people's actions reflect their beliefs more closely than their arguments do, the fact of hypocrisy regarding a given belief suggests rather strongly that even the person making the argument doesn't believe it. When an argument's proponents don't even believe it, I think it's reasonably strong evidence that it isn't true.
- ctkrohn 16y agoI actually disagree that people's actions reflect their beliefs more than their arguments. I suppose these are fundamental assumptions that you can't really present much evidence for either way, but I do think that people try to hold themselves to standards that they can't often achieve. To take a simplistic example: suppose I'm trying to stick to a rigorous diet, but I lapse every so often. Does this mean that I really don't believe the diet is important? Or if I'm trying to learn a new programming language in my spare time, perhaps I'm not as studious as I'd like... but that doesn't mean that the language isn't worth learning. It just means it's hard, and people tend to give in to laziness.