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Old 04-26-2008, 12:45 PM
saiboimushi saiboimushi is offline
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Dang, this is a difficult topic for me. I'm not sure what to put to down as a deleterious philosophy, since the very idea of what is deleterious presupposes yet another philosophy. The most obvious candidate for me is "Naziism," if one can call that a philosophy. Yet to say that Naziism is harmful is already to have in mind a definition of "harmful," which in turn rests upon an assumption of what is beneficial. Destroying an entire race of people is probably an evil thing to do--most if not all of us would agree on this point. But does our agreement rest on philosophical grounds? In other words, do we know that genocide is bad? Or do we merely believe that it is bad because our common culture tells us as much?

The same thing goes for racism and the philosophies that justify it. Is racism bad? Very likely it is. But do we know that it is bad, or are we just as ignorant as those who defend it and participate in it? If the proposition "racism is bad" is true, then our faith in this proposition is a true belief. However, while it appears self-evident that true beliefs are better than false beliefs, if we are entrenched in either kind, we have no way of knowing which is which.

It would seem, then, that the judgement of particular philosophies can only be made from the standpoint of a meta-philosophy. But how can we determine which philosophy transcends all others, and thus is truly meta?
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