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This is nonsense. Principles should adapt to the context they're applied in. In principle I'm against big government intervention into our personal lives, but y
by mdoms 5y ago
This is nonsense. Principles should adapt to the context they're applied in. In principle I'm against big government intervention into our personal lives, but you bet your ass I'm in favour of lockdowns when thousands of lives are at stake. I'm not going to let thousands of my compatriots die out of principle.
- ALittleLight 5y agoThis is just imprecise statement of principle. It's more like you're against the government intervening unless they're credibly doing it to save lives. If someone discovered how to turn a microwave into a nuclear bomb, presumably you'd support government intervention to collect all the microwaves, even if they had to intervene a lot in our lives. Likewise, you support government intervention to reduce covid deaths, etc.
- tshaddox 5y agoSure, you could just say that your “principles” are simply the entire exact sequence of actions you take in your life. That way you could by definition never change or violate your principles. But usually people use “principle” to refer to a relatively concise statement that can be applied to a large variety of situations.
- ALittleLight 5y agoI'm not familiar with any definition of the word principle that includes the idea of "concise". Principle as I'm using it here is a moral belief or guide. It's less a description of what you do and more an explanation for why you do what you do.
- tshaddox 5y agoI just mean that it must be more concise than a lookup table from every possible situational input to the recommended output. The same is implied by the term “explanation.”