I didn’t downvote your comment, but was close to doing so. (I generally downvote few comments, maybe in some sense “too few”.)
The reason why I considered downvoting: You claim that an argument implies a view widely seen as morally repugnant and (i.e. this alone is not sufficient):
You are not as clear as I think you could have been that you don’t actually ascribe the morally repugnant view to Owen, as opposed to mentioning this as an reduction ad absurdum precisely because you don’t think anyone accepts the morally repugnant conclusion.
You use more charged language than is necessary to make your point. E.g. instead of saying “repugnant” you could have said something like “which presumably no-one is willing to accept”. Similarly, it’s not relevant whether the perpetrator in your claim is a pedophile. (But it’s good to avoid even the faintest suggestion that someone in this debate is claimed to be pedophile.)
I’m not able to follow your reasoning, and suspect you may have misunderstood the comment you’re responding to. Most significantly, the above comment doesn’t argue that anything is morally okay, simpliciter - it just argues that a certain kind of moral objections, namely an appeal to bad consequences, doesn’t work for certain actions. It even explicitly lists other moral reasons against these actions. (Granted, it does suggest that these reasons aren’t so strong that the action is clearly impermissible in all circumstances.) But even setting this aside, I’m not sure why you think the above comment has the implication you think it has.
I don’t know for sure why anyone downvoted, but moderately strongly suspect they had similar reasons.
Here’s a version of your point which is still far from optimal on the above criteria (e.g. I’d probably have avoided the child abuse example altogether) but which I suspect wouldn’t have been downvoted:
I think your argument proves too much. It implies, for instance, that it’s not clearly impermissible to harm humans in similar ways in which non-human animals are being harmed because of humans slaughtering them for food. [Say 1-2 sentences about why you think this.] As a particularly drastic example, consider that virtually everyone agrees that sexual abuse of children is not permissible under any circumstances. Your argument seems to imply that there would only be a much weaker moral prohibition against child abuse. Clearly we cannot accept this conclusion. So there must be something wrong with your argument.
I strong-upvoted this because it’s super clear and detailed and the kind of thing I want to see more of on the Forum, but I haven’t actually read the original comment so don’t know if this analysis is right, just to avoid confusion
I didn’t downvote, but I also didn’t even understand whether you were agreeing with me or disagreeing with me (and strongly suspected that “would have to” was an error in either case).
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Would any of you who downvoted the comment above be willing to state why?
I didn’t downvote your comment, but was close to doing so. (I generally downvote few comments, maybe in some sense “too few”.)
The reason why I considered downvoting: You claim that an argument implies a view widely seen as morally repugnant and (i.e. this alone is not sufficient):
You are not as clear as I think you could have been that you don’t actually ascribe the morally repugnant view to Owen, as opposed to mentioning this as an reduction ad absurdum precisely because you don’t think anyone accepts the morally repugnant conclusion.
You use more charged language than is necessary to make your point. E.g. instead of saying “repugnant” you could have said something like “which presumably no-one is willing to accept”. Similarly, it’s not relevant whether the perpetrator in your claim is a pedophile. (But it’s good to avoid even the faintest suggestion that someone in this debate is claimed to be pedophile.)
I’m not able to follow your reasoning, and suspect you may have misunderstood the comment you’re responding to. Most significantly, the above comment doesn’t argue that anything is morally okay, simpliciter - it just argues that a certain kind of moral objections, namely an appeal to bad consequences, doesn’t work for certain actions. It even explicitly lists other moral reasons against these actions. (Granted, it does suggest that these reasons aren’t so strong that the action is clearly impermissible in all circumstances.) But even setting this aside, I’m not sure why you think the above comment has the implication you think it has.
I don’t know for sure why anyone downvoted, but moderately strongly suspect they had similar reasons.
Here’s a version of your point which is still far from optimal on the above criteria (e.g. I’d probably have avoided the child abuse example altogether) but which I suspect wouldn’t have been downvoted:
I strong-upvoted this because it’s super clear and detailed and the kind of thing I want to see more of on the Forum, but I haven’t actually read the original comment so don’t know if this analysis is right, just to avoid confusion
I didn’t downvote, but I also didn’t even understand whether you were agreeing with me or disagreeing with me (and strongly suspected that “would have to” was an error in either case).