I missed the second debate, but between the first and the finale there has emerged a clear strategy on the part of ILO and a complete failure of ILP to adjust it. The strategy, ofcourse, was easily predictable, almost necessarily so, to anyone that is familiar with how both sides think. ILO takes a straightfoward question with a long established manor of discourse and argues for a position that ought to completely change the strategies and reasonings of both sides. ILP being less creative and adaptive, but more logical and capable struggles to argue with traditional lines of inquiry in what ILO has changed into an unconventional debate. Completely missing that what ILO has offered is trash.
This disconnect was far more appearant in the last debate in which ILO’s position on universal morality can hardly be considered a position on universal morality at all. This allowed them, as “creative” arguments often do, to control the terms on which the discussion was held. Failing to adjust, ILP was forced to argue traditional lines against nontraditional arguments. Th, ae debate was won before it began, and it was won by a position that cannot really be considered a position on the topic to begin with. Or rather, it requires so much clarification and nuance that if it is possible to argue it all, it ought to take the entirety of a book to do so.
The genius of it is that their formulation of their position is so mundane and platitudinous that one instantly thinks one knows what it means. And instead of realizing how flawed and massively underdeveloped it was, ILP assumed it made sense and tried to levy rational arguments against an unclear and probably unreasonable position. ILP ought to have attacked it on the grounds that it doesn’t make sense, and is a meaningless statement instead of assuming that they knew what it meant and arguing against it on traditional terms. Everything that ILO said was pure nonsense, but everything that ILP said was a strawman. It was a train wreck and painful read.
Do to time constraints I will only point out how worthless ILO’s position is. To do this I will use their most concise formulations of it, which are incidentally single sentences that make nonsense look like platitudes.
In their first post we get this from Pav. :[size=85]
“the Universal Morality is that we do whatever we can (within our confines) to satisfy our individual wants or needs. We are moral; we do what is right for us.”[/size]
This is the folk psychological view of how human volition works, but it is a descriptive statement and this is a normative debate. For it to be a formulation of a universal morality it has to be an imperative and take the form of “one ought to…do what satisfies ones individual wants and needs”. ILO got away with multiple equivocations throughout the debate and seemed to flaunt the equivocation as a main part of their argument.
Gobbo starts off the second ILO post by capitalizing and advocating the equivocation when he says [size=85]Alright, describing morality in the confines of prescribed (non)action is not the only way to look at universal morality.[/size]
No Gobbo perscribed action is what morality is, and the only reason you are not laughed out of the debate when you say that is that your formulation of a universal moralityis highly equivocal. It is both a folk psychological veiw of describing human volition and your chosen formulation of morality. Your equivocation does not lead us to some grand idea about what morality is, it is just a fucking equivocation, and a particularly blatant and silly equivocation at that. You just tried to change the definition of morality based on a defect of reasonsing. So painful… The debate was won right here by ILP, they just failed to realize it
Gobbo gives us another formulation of their theory at the end of his post:
[size=85]
we’re saying, essentially, yes, doing what you want in the face of absurdity and complexity
[/size]
It is hard to even understand what this is supposed to mean, it doesn’t even say “most want”, it just says want. Well, I think I want about 1,000 different things at once, some things I want more than others, and other things I hardly want at all. Some things I value but don’t want and other things I want but don’t value. You’re asserting that I act immorally if I behave consistent with my values but not my wants when they come into conflict with each other.
I value an education but really don’t want to go to class today, if I side with my values, according to you I am being immoral. This is a serious problem with your theory, infact it is so hopelessly confused that this alone overturns and trumps all arguments any of you made.
Other problems include knowing what you want, understanding implanted wants versus authentic wants, second order wants, when wants come into conflict…and the list goes on for quite some time.
The point is that ILO based their entire position on an equivocation and advocated that equivocation, and even ignoring this their position is so general and assumes such a binary and simple human that it is hardly understandable to begin with. Yet, they got away with it because ILP was incapable of seeing through the platitudinous formulations.