Yet again for Team IPO

Find the authors argument and your counter-argument

1. Nothing is true, everything is permitted... (Nietzsche) IPO, 1996
2. Should we start from the premise that one is totally forbidden to do injustice, or should we consider that under some circumstances that is permitted? (Plato) IPO, 1995

Shuvom's take on Nietzsche's argument


My take on Nietzsche ....
Nietszche's argument
A0) Truth is subjective
i.e. Everyone has their own version of truth
A1) Something may be true for someone OR Nothing is absolutely true for anybody
R1) Everyone thinks/acts as per what they think is true
R2) Therefore everyone would do whetever they please
C) Thus Everything is permitted
Counter-Argument
X1) R1 dictates that if the base of thought is removed, people would behave in whichever way they feel (which usually is without reason)
X2) Such behavior will be tested by nature and people will (usually) end up in suffering or trouble, endangering their lives and whetever they value in them
X3) Only a rational act/thought can survive ... thus rendering A0 untrue
X4) A0 needs to be changed ... Truth is objective / real / empirical / rational
XC) From X3 - Only the truth and thoughts/actions according to it are permitted

More assignments for team IPO 2011

Frame the argument of the author of the quote and your counter argument to it.

1. The fundamental evil of government grants is the fact that men are forced to pay for the support of ideas diametrically opposed to their own. This is a profound violation of an individual’s integrity and conscience. It is viciously wrong to take the money of rational men for the support of B.F. Skinner—or vice versa. The Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man’s beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.
   “The Establishing of an Establishment," Philosophy: Who Needs It, 168
2. In the whirling Heraclitean flux which is the pragmatist’s universe, there are no absolutes. There are no facts, no fixed laws of logic, no certainty, no objectivity.
   There are no facts, only provisional “hypotheses” which for the moment facilitate human action. There are no fixed laws of logic, only mutable “conventions,” without any basis in reality. (Aristotle’s logic, Dewey remarks, worked so well for earlier cultures that it is now overdue for a replacement.) There is no certainty—the very quest for it, says Dewey, is a fundamental aberration, a “perversion.” There is no objectivity—the object is created by the thought and action of the subject.
   Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, 126
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Essay assignment for Team 2011

1. History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them. - B. R. Ambedkar
2. “Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.” - Henry Louis Mencken