Dr. Retard

I'm still seeing not one single rule of logic here. You know, DeMorgan's Law, modus ponens, something like that. It looks like everywhere "logical" is written, it ought to be replaced with "rational".

njhartsh

Dr. R wrote:
What?!? The nerve! Apparently you missed this cutting point I made:

That's (il)logic, buddy. Read it'n'weep.

- Nathan

DRFseven

And here we have it, folks; irrefutable proof that moral opinions are not subjective judgements. But, LWF, are kittens cute or not? You will be graded on your answer and this grade will go on your permanent record (I'll give you the absolute answer later).

njhartsh

We meet again, LWF.

Okay, let's take note of that. "If hitting the pedestrian resulted from an illogical action, and this caused you some kind of pain, then it was immoral." Great.

(My only comment at this point is that since I mentioned the pedestrian example, you've added the word "you" to the above for the first time. In fact the driver might not feel any pain at all, which it seems to me has nothing to do with the moral status of his or her actions. But continue.)

Predicting?!? When have you ever said anything about predicting? Again, when your moral theory comes up lacking, you fabricate new conditions and new issues that you never mentioned before. I'd hate to be a defendant in court before you--you'd convict me for breaking laws that weren't even on the books when I acted.

We established numerous posts ago that the right turn on Sixth Street was illogical, because the K-Mart the driver was heading for actually was to the left. That point is over and done with. We're agreed: The Turn Was Illogical. Now, let's go back to the test you stated (for the several-eth time):

That's exactly what my pedestrian example described. The turn was illogical; hitting the pedestrian was obviously a result of that illogical action (no turn, no hit); and it caused the pedestrian pain. Therefore, by your theory, the turn was immoral. Q.E.D.

Don't get all ex post facto on me, now. Let your test stand or fall on its own.

What are you talking about? That pedestrian is walking on a portion of Sixth Street that the driver would not have driven on had he made the logical left turn. Without the right turn, the driver doesn't hit the pedestrian--the incident doesn't happen. How much clearer can but-for causation possibly be?

You're asserting something ("turning onto Sixth Street is not what caused you to hit the pedestrian") that is clearly and demonstrably false. Doesn't that mean you're being illogical?

No, no, no. You're entirely misreading my point. The problem with your explanations is not that they presume that people have desires. The problem is the specific desires of theirs you presume they have. You do this in order to cook the results of your little moral experiments.

Example. You posed the hypothetical case of a person who wants to steal bread:

But how do you know that this person desires freedom more than food at the moment? Possibly this person is hungry enough the he doesn't care about going to jail. Or, even more likely, he thinks he can get away with the bread theft, so his fear of being locked up doesn't even enter into the equation. Either way, in your model the theft becomes an entirely "logical" (agreed, Dr. R., he means "rational," whatever) action.

The same is true for two other hypotheticals we have mentioned. You talked about a person who wants to kill his brother; I hypothesized a man who flies into a murderous rage at his wife's adulturous lover. Your system very much risks the conclusion that it is "logical" and therefore morally right for one or both of these men to commit murder. Sorry, LWF, but that is a conclusion that follows directly from your argument.

But that's obviously not acceptable to you, so you fabricate extra data to cook the books: you claim that these guys value freedom or want to avoid shame more than they desire revenge. But how do you know that? Obviously it is flat out false that everyone in the world values freedom from incarceration (multiplied by likelihood of being caught) more than (s)he values the fruits of crimes (s)he commits. In my hypothetical, the cuckolded husband doesn't give a rip about getting caught, and he thinks the shame is all on the victim, not him. His vastly overriding desire is to annihilate his wife's lover, and he does so. His actions are obviously entirely "logical" on your terms.

By your formula, disregarding your very doubtful presumptions about criminals' overriding desires, horrible crimes are often good. I disagree.

Point 1: You need to prove this if you want to establish that your morality is objective. You can't just assert it; that's not how objective fact is established.

Point 2: Really? The actor? So you really did mean "you" in the first passage of yours I quoted above. I gave you too much credit: I thought the "harm" you had in mind was to the victim, not the perpetrator. Great.

Well, that's (A) yet another new addition to your ever-growing moral theory and (B) once again, really troubling. Take the guy who kills his wife's lover: let's say he gets away with it and ends up not "offend[ed]" or "hurt[ ]" at all. You're saying he's therefore right to commit the murder? You can't be serious.

Hooray! Victory snatched from the jaws of confusion. Now I just have to get you to admit that your "since" clause is nothing more than your subjective statement of value. That's okay--my morality, everyone's morality, is "nothing more," either. We'll make a subjectivist out of you yet.

Now, to analyze your interesting conditional statements (obviously, I've added the letters so that we can refer to them in the future):
But the murderous cuckold's murder is quite possibly logical, and I hope you think it is immoral.

But the action of the driver turning right to get to K-Mart when a left is quicker and more efficient is illogical, and I hope you do not think it is immoral. Furthermore, if "illogical" is fundamentally based upon "natural" evolutionary desires, the self-sacrifice of Private A (see my previous post) is entirely illogical--and yet I certainly believe it can be moral.

This is yet another amendment to your patched-up-jeans theory. Fine--now the K-Mart driver is off the hook, but Private A is still not acting morally. I disagree.

Nope--the murderous cuckold, the murderous brother and the bread thief are acting immorally (though I suppose I might give the thief a break if he's really in desperate shape), and yet none of their actions are necessarily illogical. The theory fails again.

Nope: Private A.

Well, every one of your "if then" statements is false as far as I'm concerned. (I really don't believe that you actually accept A, B and D. They're terrifying. Please do your best at least to come to grips with the huge logical holes that the cuckold example blows in A and D.)

No, this has nothing to do with subjectivism. The fact that we don't all agree and the fact that we don't all have all the information are irrelevant to both subjectivism and objectivism.

No, subjectivism has nothing to do with "the understanding that" one "could be wrong." (Come on--think about it: what could "wrong" mean in this context?)

Hey--that's better. Now you're getting warm. The next step is putting the word "only" after "can."

You have asserted this over and over and over, but it remains nothing more than your assertion. You have given us no reason whatever to think that this thought process in fact yields objective moral truth. Moreover, I demonstrated (albeit subjectively) above that everything in your statement after "because" is wrong.

I see you've never taken a class in cooking or art or music or literature. Or read a movie or book or restaurant review. What planet are you from? People discuss and debate and quarrel over questions of taste all the time!

Also, if you haven't noticed, I've been attacking your moral theory tooth and nail. I think your "Only. Logic." mantra yields crazy results--but I'm convinced that you yourself aren't actually crazy. In an attempt to connect you with your real moral inclinations, I'm discussing, not imposing. If you tell me "Sorry, bub, but I think the vengeful husband has a right to kill the lover," then we're at loggerheads, and no more discussion on that point could be fruitful. But I suspect that in fact we agree--and that if you only recognized the results your test yields, you'd abandon it. This is the goal of point (2) from my last post.

See below about your misunderstanding of "entitle[ment]." You do not grasp the difference between epistemic and civil rights.

More generally: Well, hell, cooperation tends to work, doesn't it? Even if my roofer and I disagree about capital punishment, it still benefits both of us if he puts shingles on my roof. I get a nice roof; he gets paid. What in the world does the value of cooperation have to do with an "objective source" of morality?

Perhaps there's a Christian church in my town. (How surprising.) I don't agree with many of their tenets, but quite possibly the members of the congregation agree with me about the freedom of conscience. So they let me go to my church, and I let them go to theirs. We cooperate because we agree.

Recently, the citizens of my state had a disagreement about who should govern us. I thought it should be Roger Moe; some other people thought it should be Tim Pawlenty. Did we go to war? No! We set up a "ballot box" to count the number of adults who wanted Moe and the number who wanted Pawlenty. Why did we do this? Because we generally, subjectively agreed that it was a good way to settle this difference of opinion. We generally decided that it was in all of our individual best interests to resolve contentious issues by peaceful means rather than by fighting. Was this an objective evaluation? Of course not! We could have decided that we wanted to go down swinging ("Death to Moe!"), and nothing inscribed into the universe told us otherwise. The "ballot box" solution was something that stemmed from (1) our subjective evaluations of what outcomes were good and bad and (2) the subjective perspectives of several subjective human beings who have thought up and worked with this "democracy" thing over the last few years.

Subjective ideals create no problems when people agree--and in real life (as opposed to the feverish imaginations of objectivists), people agree a lot.

Sure, sometimes there are disagreements basic or strong enough that people decide that war is the only way to resolve them. That's yet another subjective decision. What of it? War happens to be a fact of human life at this point. I'd like to see war eliminated and all of our subjective disagreements dealt with by peaceful means; but the existence of ugly subjective value judgments doesn't disprove subjectivism.

To disprove subjectivism, you have to show that it's false, not that it's ugly.

No, I haven't. The statement "All people should be prevented from killing my sister" may be universal in its intended application (like the Fugitive Slave Act), but that does not make it absolute. Absolute-ness and subjectivity are tied to the source, not the application, of principles. "All people should be prevented from killing my sister" is subjective because it is entirely based on my perspective (and, hopefully, on many other people's as well). You fail to understand what absolute moral principles are.

Well, for starters, belief and action are two quite different things. Obviously you can put someone in jail without forcing them to believe that they deserve to be put in jail. There is nothing contradictory about that, right? One could force someone to jump in a lake (push him, perhaps) without forcing him to believe that he should jump in the lake. Note the clear logical distinction here.

You do not understand the difference between epistemic and civil rights. "Everyone is entitled to his religion" is a statement of a civil right, not an epistemic one. I explained the difference in my previous post. Read it again.

Subjectivism does not inherently require that we respect other people's beliefs at all. Big Brother was a thoroughgoing subjectivist.

Then I have proven subjectivism. Thank you.

Fine. You are quite entitled (as a civil right and certainly as an epistemic one) to your subjective moral theory.

Well, as I'm sure you realize, that implies a logical contradiction. One of my subjective meta-ethical beliefs is that internally contradictory ethical beliefs are to be avoided--but you are welcome to disagree.

This has nothing to do with absolute morality.

LWF, your notions of moral re-examination and criticism from without are not troubling in the slightest. But please note--nothing about them is the least bit objective or absolute. Your use of that terminology is pure obfuscation.

- Nathan

long winded fool

So far you all compare morality to things that have no consequences, such as personal taste. I don't think this is analogous. Once personal taste causes you to act in a certain way, your act has consequences that are now subject to objective judgment. Your action is either objectively right or it is wrong.

I agree that personal opinions are subjective. Illogical opinions are just as subjective as logical ones. (I'm trying to lose weight, so I should only eat ice cream all day.) Everyone is technically entitled to this opinion. I argue that illogical opinions are objectively wrong. If eating ice cream all day will make you fat, it is wrong to eat ice cream to lose weight. Granted, just allowing for the act itself, (eating ice cream all day) you have no objective basis and cannot possibly judge morality. Eating ice cream all day is not illogical without a premise. Once you are given the intent (trying to lose weight, or even wanting to be reasonably healthy) the act becomes either right or wrong. Perhaps eating ice cream to lose weight is not "immoral." It may just be illogical. Wanting to protect your child's life and then pouring bleach into his kool-aid might be considered immoral. Why? Both examples are equally illogical and objectively wrong. One has consequences that cause major harm to someone you desire not to harm. The other has consequences that might only cause minimal harm to yourself. Whether or not you apply the words "moral" or "immoral" is irrelevant. While morality is subjective in this sense, (call it immoral or just not smart) no one is logically entitled to believe that A is both A and not A. Those who do are absolutely wrong in their assumption of the logic of their belief. Once I have the logical variables, I can judge morality objectively, and those who have the logical variables and come to an illogical conclusion are objectively wrong in their analysis of their morality.

long winded fool

You're confusing actions here. It was illogical to turn right onto Sixth Street because K-Mart was left, if and only if, the goal is to get to K-Mart as quickly as possible. Period. You are building conclusions on top of loosely related premises without taking into account the direct causes of the consequences. It is not logical to assume that anything which happens to you on Sixth Street is the result of this action. I hope you realize that because it wouldn't have happened if you didn't turn onto Sixth Street, doesn't mean that the results are the sole consequences of your act. I once borrowed a dollar I never payed back from a girl who later became my girlfriend. Months later we got into a fight. The fight was not related to the taking of her dollar, though if I hadn't we might never have gotten to know each other, and hitting the pedestrian was not directly related to the right turn on Sixth Street, though it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't. I frankly can't understand your insistence that my argument somehow implies that this must be the case?

What are you talking about? That pedestrian is walking on a portion of Sixth Street that the driver would not have driven on had he made the logical left turn. Without the right turn, the driver doesn't hit the pedestrian--the incident doesn't happen. How much clearer can but-for causation possibly be?

So then, it was immoral to take my girlfriend's dollar because we got into a fight years later that never would have taken place if I hadn't taken the dollar? Maybe I was unclear in my example, but if that is what you took away from the argument, it's no wonder you are confused. Yes, it is true that if my mother hadn't given birth to me, I'd never have taken that dollar. She is not therefore responsible for this action. This is a textbook slippery slope, which was nowhere implied in my argument. Please don't assume fallacies exist unless they are logically necessary for the argument to follow.

You're asserting something ("turning onto Sixth Street is not what caused you to hit the pedestrian") that is clearly and demonstrably false. Doesn't that mean you're being illogical?

Then you're assertion that your mother's giving birth to you is not what caused you to get your current job is clearly and demonstrably false! Unless you admit that your mother is entirely responsible for you having your job, you are being equally illogical. This is the fallacy of a genuine but insignificant cause. I once chopped down a tree. Am I responsible for deforestation? Well, on a ludicrous level, yeah.

No, no, no. You're entirely misreading my point. The problem with your explanations is not that they presume that people have desires. The problem is the specific desires of theirs you presume they have. You do this in order to cook the results of your little moral experiments.

:banghead: Morality can't exist without desires. If I fail to presume desires, I cannot discuss morality.

Example. You posed the hypothetical case of a person who wants to steal bread:

But how do you know that this person desires freedom more than food at the moment? Possibly this person is hungry enough the he doesn't care about going to jail. Or, even more likely, he thinks he can get away with the bread theft, so his fear of being locked up doesn't even enter into the equation. Either way, in your model the theft becomes an entirely "logical" (agreed, Dr. R., he means "rational," whatever) action.

It doesn't matter. You are not discussing morality, you are discussing action. If you assume no desires, you assume no morality. A falling boulder is not a moral action. Knowingly pushing a boulder onto a person is a moral or immoral action, because there is some intent in the action.

The same is true for two other hypotheticals we have mentioned. You talked about a person who wants to kill his brother; I hypothesized a man who flies into a murderous rage at his wife's adulturous lover. Your system very much risks the conclusion that it is "logical" and therefore morally right for one or both of these men to commit murder. Sorry, LWF, but that is a conclusion that follows directly from your argument.

This is true. Any action can be moral or immoral. Intent is required for actual indentification. Assuming no intent and placing moral value is irrational, i.e. that exploding volcano was immoral.

By your formula, disregarding your very doubtful presumptions about criminals' overriding desires, horrible crimes are often good. I disagree.

False. Disregarding presumptions about a criminal's desires, crimes are neither moral or immoral. They are simply actions which have taken place.

Well, that's (A) yet another new addition to your ever-growing moral theory and (B) once again, really troubling. Take the guy who kills his wife's lover: let's say he gets away with it and ends up not "offend[ed]" or "hurt[ ]" at all. You're saying he's therefore right to commit the murder? You can't be serious.

I'm serious. If he gets everything he desires and nothing he wants to avoid he is acting morally. I thought you were the subjectivist here?

Now, to analyze your interesting conditional statements (obviously, I've added the letters so that we can refer to them in the future):
But the murderous cuckold's murder is quite possibly logical, and I hope you think it is immoral.

Of course not. If it is logical it can't be immoral. I do not think it is logical because I assume that he desires to not commit crimes unnecessarily and that killing his wife was unnecessary. If you can show that this is not the case, then I will realize that this actually was moral. I don't think anyone can do this. Simply claiming that it was logical doesn't necessarily make it logical. The variables must be examined, unless the individual making the claim has the authority to declare what is logical and what is not, regardless of the variables.

This is yet another amendment to your patched-up-jeans theory. Fine--now the K-Mart driver is off the hook, but Private A is still not acting morally. I disagree.

If the desire is preservation of the species, (which is the purpose of preservation of self) sacrificing one for two would be moral.

Nope--the murderous cuckold, the murderous brother and the bread thief are acting immorally (though I suppose I might give the thief a break if he's really in desperate shape), and yet none of their actions are necessarily illogical. The theory fails again.

??? Well I'm glad you cleared that up! You do realize that having have no logical basis for these strange assertions I can only shrug my shoulders and say "okey dokey?"

Well, every one of your "if then" statements is false as far as I'm concerned. (I really don't believe that you actually accept A, B and D. They're terrifying. Please do your best at least to come to grips with the huge logical holes that the cuckold example blows in A and D.)

I see no logical holes.

You have asserted this over and over and over, but it remains nothing more than your assertion. You have given us no reason whatever to think that this thought process in fact yields objective moral truth. Moreover, I demonstrated (albeit subjectively) above that everything in your statement after "because" is wrong.

Please show me exactly how this is the case? Without assumption of intent, you can no more judge morality than you can logic. When you place a label of "cuckold" or even specify knowingly murdering another person, you ARE arbitrarily pressuposing intent. Why can you do this, but I can't?

Also, if you haven't noticed, I've been attacking your moral theory tooth and nail. I think your "Only. Logic." mantra yields crazy results--but I'm convinced that you yourself aren't actually crazy. In an attempt to connect you with your real moral inclinations, I'm discussing, not imposing. If you tell me "Sorry, bub, but I think the vengeful husband has a right to kill the lover," then we're at loggerheads, and no more discussion on that point could be fruitful. But I suspect that in fact we agree--and that if you only recognized the results your test yields, you'd abandon it. This is the goal of point (2) from my last post.

So why are you arbitrarily assuming "vengeance?" Isn't this what discussing morality is all about? Don't tell me to abandon my presuppositions of desire and then say that the act is not necessarily moral. In your view, I assume that killing one's wife is only immoral if you allow for some kind of intent. If there is a gas leak I am unaware of and I light a cigarette and blow up my house, killing my wife, is this immoral? If you can assume intent, so can I. If you want to abandon the assumption of intent, then I suggest you do so in your own argument.

More generally: Well, hell, cooperation tends to work, doesn't it? Even if my roofer and I disagree about capital punishment, it still benefits both of us if he puts shingles on my roof. I get a nice roof; he gets paid. What in the world does the value of cooperation have to do with an "objective source" of morality?

So, whether or not one should do something is subjective, but we should do things that work?

Perhaps there's a Christian church in my town. (How surprising.) I don't agree with many of their tenets, but quite possibly the members of the congregation agree with me about the freedom of conscience. So they let me go to my church, and I let them go to theirs. We cooperate because we agree.

So if you disagree, would you then refuse to cooperate, or would you try to convince the Christians of their error? By what authority can you do this, if they are not truly in error. Does your morality allow you to purposely deceive? Though the Christians are not objectively wrong, you are trying to get them to change. Isn't this deceit? Is this part of your moral code?

Subjective ideals create no problems when people agree--and in real life (as opposed to the feverish imaginations of objectivists), people agree a lot.

Objective ideals also create no problems when people agree.

Sure, sometimes there are disagreements basic or strong enough that people decide that war is the only way to resolve them. That's yet another subjective decision. What of it? War happens to be a fact of human life at this point. I'd like to see war eliminated and all of our subjective disagreements dealt with by peaceful means; but the existence of ugly subjective value judgments doesn't disprove subjectivism.

To disprove subjectivism, you have to show that it's false, not that it's ugly.


True, but the subjective value judgments are not ugly, they simply personally offend you as an individual, correct? Should I care about this? Do you desire that these value judgments which you do not like be eliminated? Is this based on objective reason, or on personal opinion. If the latter, your opinion must then be equal in value to anyone else's in my view.

No, I haven't. The statement "All people should be prevented from killing my sister" may be universal in its intended application (like the Fugitive Slave Act), but that does not make it absolute. Absolute-ness and subjectivity are tied to the source, not the application, of principles. "All people should be prevented from killing my sister" is subjective because it is entirely based on my perspective (and, hopefully, on many other people's as well). You fail to understand what absolute moral principles are.

Why should a given thing ought to be universal? We assume that the laws of physics are applied universally. Why? Isn't it because they are assumed absolute? Universal application by humans indicates an absolute belief, even if apart from human thought it doesn't necessitate an absolute law.

Well, for starters, belief and action are two quite different things. Obviously you can put someone in jail without forcing them to believe that they deserve to be put in jail. There is nothing contradictory about that, right? One could force someone to jump in a lake (push him, perhaps) without forcing him to believe that he should jump in the lake. Note the clear logical distinction here.

Agreed. So the morality of beliefs is subjective, but morality of actions is not. Believe whatever you want, but only engage in action that is moral. What is the next logical question? What is the only answer that prevents circular reasoning?

Subjectivism does not inherently require that we respect other people's beliefs at all. Big Brother was a thoroughgoing subjectivist.

Ok. I can accept this. "My morality is right and yours is wrong," can be a statement of someone who is a moral subjectivist by your definition.

Dr Rick

"You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means" - Inigo, the Spanish swordsman of The Princess Pride, who lives only to avenge his father's death

njhartsh

I guess I need to break this down into points again.

Causation.
It is very difficult to critique your moral theory when you are continually moving the goalposts. Every term quoted above is a newly fabricated addition to your allegedly objective moral rule. Let's remember what you said a few posts ago:

See that? "Resulted from." Not "direct cause" (whatever that is). Not "sole consequence." Not "entirely responsible." Not "the fallacy of a genuine but insignificant cause" (please, find that for me in the list in Constructing a Logical Argument.) You said "resulted from." Woe unto me, I took you at your word.

It is trivially and unquestionably true that every single action has a chain of billions of consequences, spinning off into the probabilistic ether from the moment it is taken. Self-evidently you're correct that my mother bearing me is a but-for cause of my getting my current job. This forum message "resulted from" my birth, as well as from a trillion other things. It escaped (and escapes) me why you cho(o)se to pin moral responsibility on any "illogical" action in that vast chain.

The pedestrian's death "resulted from" an illogical right turn on Sixth Street. You cannot seriously dispute this. By the moral theory you stated (and I was responding to) up until this most recent post, the right turn is immoral. Before that, it was the mere illogicality that was immoral, but then you added the "human harm" element to the equation. I'm having a difficult time keeping up with your moving goalposts.


LWF's Favorite Fabricated Desires.
":banghead:" is right! I find it inexplicable how you could have read my statement above and still written the statement below. Read my underlined sentence above. Now read it again. Now read it again. Got it? The problem with your explanations is not that they presume that people have desires. Got it?

Here's the problem:
Shrewdly, you avoid the point entirely:
This is first meaningless, then irrelevant. I suspect you have no answer to this particular problem with your theory.

I give you a hypothesis, such as a husband who desires vengeance upon his wife's lover. (This man is not a "falling boulder": he desires vengeance. Got it? He has desires. Got it? But none more significant than vengeance. Got it?)

You respond:
But, once again, you have no way of knowing that he has those "other desires." It Is Very Likely False That The Man Fears Prison Or Shame. This is not the first time I've tried to explain this to you:

I suppose we really ought to be finished discussing this particular point. If you still fail to see the illegitimacy of inventing arbitrary "desires" to apply to hypothetical murderers (desires that they certainly may not hold) just so that you can cover up the problems with your moral theory, then I'm not sure you can grasp the terms of this argument.

It's worth noting that all of the conclusions regarding your propositions A-E follow from the above analyses. All of your comically broad statements about "illogical actions" yield (IMO) absurd results when a wrong-turner or a vengeful (but not prison-cowardly) cuckold is at issue. Do the analysis yourself.

Uh-oh: you did.
Ouch. You've just condoned murder.

Well--I hope you understand that, when presented with a person who believes that the only moral check on violence is the question of whether the attacker "gets everything he desires and nothing he wants to avoid," then there is a very "logical" strategy to employ: avoid that person.

Good day.

- Nathan

long winded fool

Nathan, you are essentially telling me that it is wrong to arbitrarily assume desires unecessarily. Despite your insistence to the contrary, your problem is "how do I know that the person desires such and such... etc." That is to say, why should you accept the desires I have given. I say, if they desire such and such, then moral or immoral.

Do you ever condone murder? You might say no. But what if it is in self-defense, then you might say yes. Should I accuse you then of having a ridiculous system and changing your rules as you go? There are always exceptions to general rules, don't you agree? What if the murderer is insane, or honestly believed his life was in danger? You are trying to trap me into saying that one general action is always immoral. When I present instances where it is not, you seem to think that this refutes my argument because I'm "moving goal posts." This is a very common argument used in discussing the morality of a situation. "It is morally wrong to kill a child." "Wrong! If killing the child is the only way to save the lives of the five babies he is about to kill, it becomes the moral thing to do. Therefore you can't say that it is immoral to kill a child." You try to eliminate all possible mitigating circumstances from a statement, take my response to the general question and then reinsert them to show that I must be wrong. This is not rational. I'm not using this method to try to disprove subjective morality, why would you use it? If you want to remove other possibilities, fine, but don't reinsert them after I have answered, because all I can do is agree with you.

LWF: "All other desires and circumstances aside, it is wrong to drive faster than the speed limit."
njhartsh: "Not if someone's life depends on getting somewhere quickly."
LWF: "I agree."

When I "arbitrarily" add if then statements into my own argument, it is no different that when you do after I answer. You are guilty of the same thing I am. Why should I assume that the cuckold killed his wife out of vengeance? Because that was the situation you gave me. Why should you assume that the criminal desires not to be in jail? Because that's the situation I gave you. No difference. You are pushing the question back by eliminating one of the premises and trying to show that the conclusion is unsound. Speeding is not absolutely morally wrong. Speeding given a large string of variables can be morally wrong or morally right. Logic is the only deciding factor.

btw, do you really think that appealing to a genuine but insignificant cause is not a logical fallacy? It certainly is.