![]() The extraordinary increase in the psychotherapeutic drug market appears to have begun with the advent of the SSRIs, the first of which was Lilly’s Prozac. 1 Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (“SSRIs” - Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil in particular), constitute a large, if not the majority, proportion of the psychotherapeutic class of drugs making it the number one therapeutic class. Perhaps a real reductio ad absurdum.Psychotherapeutic drugs are the number one class of drugs in the United States with sales of over 23 billion dollars in 2001 (considerably higher than drugs used to treat cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes). ![]() And if you want to refute them, you’re going to have to find another argument that does it. It works because they don’t want to accept those consequences anymore than we do, and so they accept that there is a problem that they need to work on.īut if they decide to accept that and claim that it isn’t a problem, there’s nothing more for them to do. If they bite the bullet, they are being rather admirable in committing to their theory … but many times it’s a consequence that they really would rather avoid, and so it sends them back off to the drawing board to see if they can avoid the problem. So, then, why are these arguments useful? They are useful because they highlight potential problems that the advocate may not accept, and also in that vein would force them to take a stand or abandon their position. You may act like Sam Harris and storm off in anger and confusion, but you cannot pretend to have refuted their argument. So there’s no real refutation there at all. And the person who argues that whatever God says is moral can indeed insist that even though we think that it isn’t moral, it would be if God said it was. The OA advocate can accept that somewhere there is indeed a perfect island (it need not be on Earth). The moral agency advocate can say that, regardless of our intuitions, it is indeed the case that torture is morally superior to a painless truth serum. The Utilitarian can simply bite the bullet and say that whatever heinous action you’re justifying just is the one that is morally right, and our intuitions are wrong to think that it isn’t (see trolley cases for examples of how you can do that). Thus, you have a refutation.īut none of the above cases are actually that sort of case. ![]() ![]() You’d have to deny a true statement or accept an actual logical contradiction. If it does lead to a contradiction, you can’t bite the bullet. In the strong cases of that, what you have is an actual contradiction … something that cannot be true because it either contradicts a known fact or, more ideally, contradicts itself. See, this is where the confusion with reductio ad absurdum comes in. But they aren’t as strong as they seem, because the person you’re using them against has a way out: bite the bullet. And I admit that these sorts of arguments are popular and often useful. Now, in many of these cases, people toss these out, stand back, and fold their arms smugly. But it is absurd to say that genocide can be moral. But then if God asked you to commit genocide, that would mean that that was moral. But a perfect island existing is absurd.Ĥ) You believe that what is moral is just what God says is moral. But the same thing could be said of a perfect island. But it’s absurd to think that torture might be a more moral choice than giving the painless truth serum.ģ) The ontological argument says that a perfect being must exist, since existing is better than not existing. This means that you could not allow the use of a painless truth serum to find out where the terrorist hid that nuclear bomb, but you might be able to torture the terrorist since pain allows them to still make a choice. So how can increasing utility be what it means to be moral?Ģ) If you base your moral code completely on the idea of moral agency, you have to argue that you can’t do anything that would unduly restrict agency. But it just seems absurd to say that killing people might be moral. But it is possible to see how sometimes killing people might increase utility. There’s a specific misconception that seems to permeate discussions, especially from those who aren’t really well-versed in philosophy, which is about how certain counter-arguments actually work … mostly in confusing arguments to odd or counter-intuitive conclusions for actual reduction ad absurums.ġ) Utilitarians say that whatever is moral is what provides the most utility.
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