I don’t think I defended my remarks on the matter as well as I could have, and David Moss has brought to light some of what Bentham initially said and used that to make a good point. MichaelDickens, you’ve expressed a critical stance towards the post I wrote that uses the term “quackery” and is polemical.
But if you take a look, you will see from the tone and links provided that I am responding in an ongoing exchange that has spanned quite some time. During that time, Bentham has routinely made far more inflammatory and insulting remarks about antirealist views. For instance, this was a section heading he used in an early post on moral realism (one of the two I linked a response to here):
Cultural Relativism: Crazy, Illogical, and Accepted by no One Except Philosophically Illiterate Gender Studies Majors
Bentham also repeatedly describes views like mine as “crazy”. Here’s one example:
Well, in this article, I’ll explain why moral anti-realism is so implausible — while one always can accept the anti-realist conclusion, it’s always possible to bite the bullet on crazy conclusions. Yet moral anti-realism, much like anti-realism about the external world, is wildly implausible in what it says about the world.
I worry that you drew a conclusion about my tone without taking into consideration Bentham’s own tone and what I was responding to.
I don’t think I defended my remarks on the matter as well as I could have, and David Moss has brought to light some of what Bentham initially said and used that to make a good point. MichaelDickens, you’ve expressed a critical stance towards the post I wrote that uses the term “quackery” and is polemical.
But if you take a look, you will see from the tone and links provided that I am responding in an ongoing exchange that has spanned quite some time. During that time, Bentham has routinely made far more inflammatory and insulting remarks about antirealist views. For instance, this was a section heading he used in an early post on moral realism (one of the two I linked a response to here):
You can find this here.
Bentham also repeatedly describes views like mine as “crazy”. Here’s one example:
I worry that you drew a conclusion about my tone without taking into consideration Bentham’s own tone and what I was responding to.