Difference between revisions of "Fallacies Of Philosophy"
From Critiques Of Libertarianism
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=== Reifications === | === Reifications === | ||
The fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing. Ideas such as "[[Inviolable Private Sphere of Rights]]" abound: indeed innumerable non-legal (moral) ideas of rights undergo reification. | The fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing. Ideas such as "[[Inviolable Private Sphere of Rights]]" abound: indeed innumerable non-legal (moral) ideas of rights undergo reification. | ||
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| + | === Incomplete Statements === | ||
| + | Much philosophy is rooted in incomplete statements. For example, "Man was meant to live free." (Foundation for Economic Education calls this "the freedom philosophy.") But meant BY WHOM? Such a statement is nonsensical because it is lacking a necessary subject or object: it properly should be written "X meant man to live free", where X is "nature" or "god" or whatever reification (fiction) is needed for the argument. It's funny that with the libertarian emphasis on primacy of values of individuals, which they use to rebut claims about social values that some libertarians resort to such evasive claims. It's obvious that most individuals hold different values: "I should live free, everybody else should be regulated for my benefit." And free of what? | ||
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| + | Almost all uses by libertarians of "[[A Positive Model Of Rights|rights]", "desert", "freedom" and other important philosophical terms suffer from this problem. | ||
=== Philosophers are very poor at second-best solutions. === | === Philosophers are very poor at second-best solutions. === | ||
