If the OP hadn’t started with morality, but had taken the more general case, I’d say he was correct
I wanted an example to demonstrate the general case; but I’m beginning to think “morality” made a very poor example—precisely because the “conceptual nonsense” you mention gets in the way of the point.
I’ll see if I can come up with a better example by this evening.
I think the canonical example is whether a fetus is a human being.
But to give you my stock reply to this kind of argument by definition, I say it’s grounded in a fundamental mistake—valuing according to your categories, instead of categorizing according to your values. It’s not whether a fetus fits into some typology, it’s whether you value it in the full context of all of it’s qualities, regardless of what labels you apply to it.
That’s both a better example and good answer to it; my point was that I think the mistake (or at least, its use and abuse in argument) is at least somewhat intentional.
That’s a hard one. Recently, I’ve more and more concluded that there are fundamentally different modes of thinking and behaving that distinguish different types of people.
The intent is to win. The mind seeks out arguments that will win. Only a subset of minds are subconsciously concerned about the logical validity of the argument used to win. So I wouldn’t say that people “intend to use a logically invalid argument to win”; the logical validity of the argument is just irrelevant to their minds, and thereby unnoticed, unless it is explicitly brought to their consciousness by their opponent, and even then it’s often not so relevant.
I wanted an example to demonstrate the general case; but I’m beginning to think “morality” made a very poor example—precisely because the “conceptual nonsense” you mention gets in the way of the point.
I’ll see if I can come up with a better example by this evening.
I think the canonical example is whether a fetus is a human being.
But to give you my stock reply to this kind of argument by definition, I say it’s grounded in a fundamental mistake—valuing according to your categories, instead of categorizing according to your values. It’s not whether a fetus fits into some typology, it’s whether you value it in the full context of all of it’s qualities, regardless of what labels you apply to it.
That’s both a better example and good answer to it; my point was that I think the mistake (or at least, its use and abuse in argument) is at least somewhat intentional.
That’s a hard one. Recently, I’ve more and more concluded that there are fundamentally different modes of thinking and behaving that distinguish different types of people.
The intent is to win. The mind seeks out arguments that will win. Only a subset of minds are subconsciously concerned about the logical validity of the argument used to win. So I wouldn’t say that people “intend to use a logically invalid argument to win”; the logical validity of the argument is just irrelevant to their minds, and thereby unnoticed, unless it is explicitly brought to their consciousness by their opponent, and even then it’s often not so relevant.
How about:
Whether dolphins are fish or mammals
Whether the plural of “fish” is “fish” or “fishes”
Whether the author of the original post (that is, you), should be referred to as “he”, “they”, or “ey”