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I get where you are coming from on this, but honestly sometimes things are just subclasses (in the programming sense) of something that you have thought a lot a
by 3pt14159 15y ago
I get where you are coming from on this, but honestly sometimes things are just subclasses (in the programming sense) of something that you have thought a lot about and ultimately completely rejected.
For example: "The government should sometimes run things that private industry can run and compete upon" is the super class of "the government should run envelope delivery" so why should I not just dismiss the second statement immediately if I firmly dismiss the first?
Sometimes edge cases pop up, but why waste the time to go through the cycles of reiterating all the same points?
- cobrausn 15y agoArguably, a 'superclass' of that is 'The government should run everything the private industry could'. Is it still correct?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- gxs 15y agoI think if you take the time to see if something is actually an edge case or not, you'll see that we are arguing the same thing.
- mikeash 15y agoBecause firmly dismissing such a broad statement is rarely correct. Life is full of subtlety and ambiguity. There are no concrete laws of life like there are laws of physics. To simply state that something so general is treu or false is to refuse to consider that individual situations won't fit within such clean theoretical lines. There's nothing wrong with values and principles. It's almost impossible to reason through everything in life completely, since everything is so complex. Values and principles give you something to fall back on when reason runs out. The trouble comes when people use values and principles as an excuse to not even bother trying to reason through things, as you are advocating here. Values and principles are simply heuristics. They can work decently in some cases, but when something better than a basic heuristic is available, you want to use it.