RiverDad
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2009
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Would it be logical for the church to allow him to run their day care? Even though you deflect and refuse to answer the question, you know it wouldn't be. It would actually be IMO criminal for them to hire him to do that.
No, it would not be criminal for this company to allow this guy to drive but it would put them in more risk. That's not a call anyone but the owner should make.
Keep at it, you're in the right here and Captain Courtesy is simply using cheap debating tricks in order to avoid engaging in a full and honest debate on this issue.
In philosophy/logic we use a number of methods to develop understanding of issues.
One method is inductive reasoning. One creates similar situations which differ in detail but require a similar decision be made. One analyzes what motivates the decision being made in these dissimilar instances and generalizes towards a central principle.
Another method is to hold a central principle and use deductive reasoning to apply it to different situations and see if the principle holds.
These false cries of fallacy by appeal to emotion are no such thing. The charge can be negated by simply stating that the person is choosing to violate their general principle in the special case of a pedophile being placed in charge of children. For your position and mine, this admission is useful because we can now examine what criteria is necessary for a person to make an exception to their general rule and then we can see whether those conditions can be applied to drunk drivers of semi-trucks on public roads.
So keep at it - you're doing good work in trying to get people to honestly engage in the issue while they rely on appeals to their own authority, make bombastic declarations about destroying arguments (when they haven't) and rely on tricks to narrowly limit discussion so that they can avoid developing deeper understanding of the broader principles at play in this issue.