Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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You cannot square these two statements. If it's a fallacy then you are not justified in discounting their argument. They may be a hypocrite, but it doesn't mean that their argument isn't both valid and sound. The smoking example by the other reply is a great example.
Wrong, you absolutely can. It's considered a fallacy, logically or formally speaking, because it doesn't deal with the actual "point", but casts aspersions on whomever's motives or fitness to deliver it. If you are strictly debating Topic X then that is technically (or logically, or whatever) irrelevant. In reality, if someone is moralizing at you then their being immoral or amoral is actually pretty significant.
If any given person is saying [something you're doing] is morally wrong, then you'd be naturally less inclined to take that feedback from e.g. Hitler. I hope. Formally that is an error, in reality it's still sort of a reasonable thing to keep in mind.
Given a valid structure, true premises must necessarily lead to a true conclusion. A fallacy is an invalid structure; therefore, you cannot know whether or not the conclusion is true. If you can't know the truth value of the conclusion, you wouldn't be correct to reject their argument.
Using the go to example: Plato argues P1) All men are mortal, P2) Socrates is a man, C) Socrates is mortal. Valid structure, sound premises, the conclusion must be true.
Using the smoking example: P1) Person A claims smoking is dangerous, P2) Person A smokes, C) Smoking isn't dangerous.
This argument is invalid in structure because Premise 2 is fallacious. Premise 1 doesn't connect to Premise 2 to lead to the conclusion. Given no additional information, you would not be able to ascertain the truth value of the conclusion, it may or may not be true using this deductive argument.
But if Hitler said, "it's not right to just go around killing people at random" it wouldn't be false because he's Hitler.
If you don't trust someone for whatever reason (hypocrisy or what), then the best you can do logically is look more closely at their argument for flaws. Logic doesn't care about morals or hypocrisy and it's just not that easy to prove or disprove things. Hypocrites can be right and honest people doing their best to present a good faith argument can be wrong.