: : I agree that your posts always had logical arguments, and I hope you'll reconsider leaving. Your insights, while not always popular, were always interesting, and besides, I, personally, would miss you.
: : -Floyd: Floyd, you surprise me.
Do I now? Well, you're neither the first, nor the last, I suspect. ;-)
:I don't doubt you'll miss Cope, and I won't argue with you that his insights were not always popular, but what's with the praise of his logic?
Actually, I found Cope's reasoning to be internally consistent, and to have a high degree of correspondence with the phenomenological world that I observe, so I feel pretty justified in complimenting him on his logic.
:In his arguments with me about animal rights, he claimed that with regard to animals, humans were superior, that morality only attached to humans, and that animals (in a particularly odious post, I thought) could not suffer spiritually. As Sir Gideon has so aptly demonstrated to me, these assertions cannot be proved by logic, but are mere statements of opinion, faith, or even emotion.
Well, since logic, per se, doesn't directly enter into this topic, it seems useless to critique him for what you consider unsound reasoning.
:Cope may have had his logical moments, but his diatribes against animal rights were not among them.
: That said, I did like all his other posts. As for animal rights, he needs to lay off the meat -- that would clear his mind up real fast.
Quite possibly. On a personal note, I live in Seattle, and last year, in accordance with international treaty, the Makah hunted and killed a whale. I love whales, but the Makah were well within their rights to kill the animal. (Naturally, whales are also well within their rights to tip over boats and drown folks if they want to. No diff, IMHO.) This has no bearing on supposed "superiority" or "moral worth," neither of which are scientifically grounded topics, and therefore both are outside the realm of issues that I can have a meaningful, operational discussion about. I can't say that what the Hopi or the Makah do is "right" in any moral sense, but nor can I say it is absolutely "wrong." The question of which actions are right and which are wrong is culturally constructed, and the Hopi and the Makah have a different set of cultural norms than I do. It would certainly be wrong for ME to do what they did, just as it would probably be unacceptable for a Hopi or Makah man to do what I do. It is also, IMHO, inappropriate to judge the Hopi or the Makah on the basis of the correspondence of their cultural practices to ours.
However, animal rights were not a topic I discussed with Copenhagen. He and I discussed epistemology and ontology, and in those discussions, his arguments were consistently well-reasoned and logically sound, and I repeat that I will miss the opportunity to discuss these issues.
-Floyd
None.
