So for the past couple of days you’ve all been very indulgent as I have worked by way through a rhetorical device that I have been pondering for a couple of weeks now. The idea can be summarized as follows: Many disputes can be expressed as being grounded in two opposing myths: that the world …
Category Archive: dueling myth hypothesis
Jan 24 2013
The usefulness of the duelling myth postulate
Yesterday we ran through a few examples of arguments that can be framed using the duelling myth model. I want to stress how trivially easy it was to find those arguments, and the relative ease with which I was able to fit them into the framework. Indeed, anyone who has spent any amount of time …
Jan 23 2013
The duelling myth postulate examined: anti-Feminism
One last example to round out the day’s discussion. This one comes to us courtesy of former FTBorg turned reluctant prophet to horrible people Al Stefanelli. In making a completely original argument comparing the Atheism+ forum to McCarthyism, he also rails against a new foe of all that is good and right in the world …
Jan 23 2013
The duelling myth postulate examined: #IdleNoMore
Our next example comes courtesy of the comment threads from this story. I highly suggest that if you read Christie Blatchford’s execrable opinion piece, you take the time to read this patient takedown from Rabble. This comment is, admittedly, cherry-picked, but it is a relatively common argument that turns up pretty much every time racial …
Jan 23 2013
The dueling myth postulate examined: religious persecution
Let’s take a few examples that are not hypothetical, and see if we can apply the framework to statements and arguments made in the real world. Our first such example is one that is likely intimately familiar to most of us, Christian faux-persecution:
Jan 22 2013
Moral conflict in the dueling myth postulate
We can see from the previous discussion that it is trivially easy to imagine a situation in which two parties come into direct moral conflict over a single issue, owing almost entirely to their respective evaluations of the fairness of a system. Where one side sees a strong moral imperative to preserve a system, the …
Jan 22 2013
Ethical dimensions of the dueling myth postulate
It is profoundly mundane to merely point out “hey, some people don’t agree about some things“, but it’s when we consider the moral consequences of these disagreements that the ‘rubber hits the road’, so to speak. Because we have general agreement between parties that fairness is both morally good and important, but disagreement over whether …
Jan 22 2013
The dueling myth postulate
I wish to postulate that it is useful to think of many disagreements as the collision of two opposing myths. The first myth, what I call the ‘fairness myth’ (and will heretofore refer to as f-myth) is very simply stated: the world is a fair place. You will undoubtedly have heard this described as the …
Jan 21 2013
The audience for this argument
A final note to sum up the preamble to this discussion. This whole idea is predicated on an assumption for which there is abundant counter-factual evidence. The central dogma of the discussion is that people in disputes both agree that ‘fairness’ is a good and desirable thing. Yes, I can hear you snickering, because there …
Jan 21 2013
A primer on fairness
There is another term that I have to define, however operationally, before this conversation can continue. I will also be making repeated reference to the word ‘fair’. This is a much more difficult concept to define without someone raising an objection, or without descending into progressively more circular terms until I spiral inward upon myself …
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