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"All men are created equal"
"God's love is unconditional"
I feel the pain in my head. I think its because I genuinely want to understand why they truly believe what they are saying while not seeing the clear contradictions, but try as I might I just cannot. I have found that I feel the same way when a contradiction betweeen a belief and action within myself occurs. For example I believe nothing really matters, but every decision and action I take obviously contradicts this belief.
The pain has a name. Confusion. With awareness that such ideas impact the world and yourself it combines with sadness, pity, anger, frustration or a combination of all of them. Maybe this is the pain you feel in the stomach. Zen uses koans to take confusion to a heighten level in order to show an individual that all thought is equally confused depending on your perspective. The truth is there is nothing solid or certain just a feeling (that is created/invented) that there is. Belief, thought, action, feeling have little to do with reality. People have a limitless ability to rationalize just about anything and make the most absurd ideas true for themselves. The corners you feel are all pinned down are coners you or people collectively have created for yourself. Different corners, different conclusions, different logic. How you react to ideas, whether fast or not, is based upon the corners your logic uses (and so is in a sense kinethetic) and how they are set up over a lifetime is as individual as fingerprints.
What is wrong with your example sentences? They are not arguments, there is no logic to be flawed. Sure, they can be interpreted to refer to factually wrong conjectures, namely that all men at some early point in their live are literally identical and that there is a god with associated bunch of problematic properties.
But this is not necessarily or even often so. For one, these sentences easily lend themselves to non-problematic interpretations: (1) says that all men are similar in significant ways, or that the commonalities are more important than differences, or that they start with the same machinery and may or may not develop it in different ways; while (2) simply means that life and human condition is good and death and non-existence is bad.
Finally, you've got to look at how these are actually used in speech. I'm beginning to see your point here, these sentences are often used as universal rebuttals, or refer to some vague moral maxims which are hard to argue against, they fulfill several patterns, trapping thought and leaving impression of closure where there is none. Is this why you react to them so badly? Do they simply trigger facepalm response without you actually struggling against bad logic?
It is in the use of an idea that the facepalm response occurs. Argueing for the concept of meritocracy for example by using the idea all men are created equal. I believe many feel people fail or succeed based on their efforts without consideration for other factors such as those outlined above and probably the most impotant factor LUCK.
I don’t understand the problem with “all men are created equal.”
Leaving aside the Creator/God implications of the original, this boils down to a claim about certain “rights” that all people should have and how the government should treat people, i.e., by leaving them free to pursue the same rights. Obviously the idea was implemented very imperfectly at the beginning, and continues to be implemented imperfectly today, but the idea itself – that all people have a right to live, to be free, and to own property, and that the government should set up a society in which those rights are protected and should not play favorites – doesn’t seem that crazy to me.
edited to add: I see that you're a relatively new poster. Welcome to LessWrong!
Well, yes, if you boil the original quote down to "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are [irrelevant stuff] endowed [somehow or other] with certain unalienable Rights, and [details about rights]" then whatever problems there are with the pieces you cut out (including "all men are created equal") will be difficult to see.
As a general rule, if you want to explore the implications of a particular phrase, it really helps to attend to that phrase, not elide over it.
Anyway, for my own part, if your understanding of "created equal" here is compatible with some people being born smart, some dumb, some sociopathic, some epileptic, some congenitally ill, and so on and so forth, then there's no problem. But I have a problem with folks, and there are many, who quote that line when their understanding of equality is incompatible with readily observed discrepancies in initial conditions and capabilities among people.
Given a quote like this, I think the best/most obvious interpretation is to read the quote in its famous historical and political context. Divorced from that context and read literally, it is obviously false. To the extent people are parroting those words to invoke a literal interpretation, that is obviously wrong. That being said, I think that in most cases where the term is used with even the slightest thought and consideration, it is steeped in at least a bit of the political flavor of the original and is used as a statement about how people interact with each other, government, and/or society.
Fair enough.
My answer to your original question ("I don’t understand the problem with “all men are created equal.”) boils down to the fact that it is often quoted outside of its original context, causing it to be (as you say) obviously wrong.
When it is instead quoted with due consideration for its original context, properly steeped in the proper political flavor, and as a statement about how people interact, I agree with you that it stops being obviously wrong, and becomes much less problematic.
I think the majority of real-world uses are in the former category. I could be wrong.
I don't think I've ever heard it used the former way, though perhaps we run in different circles.
Huh. It seems unlikely that different circles accounts for all of the difference; more likely one or both of us is suffering from selective data neglect. I'll have to pay more attention to this as it comes up in the future.
Blank slateists?
Well, I was thinking more of the folks who just quote it without thinking about what they're actually saying at all, but sure, insofar as there exist universal blank-slatists, them too. (I mean, I think there's room for legitimate uncertainty about what differences are determined at "creation" and what differences are imposed later, but it seems clear that some very important things really are different at "creation.")
The problem is that it's wrong. All men are not created / did not come into existence equal. Intelligence, genetic risk factors for disease, appearance, etc are all examples of inequalities in the creation or existence of man. It is clear from the text that 'equal' means more than 'equally endowed with unalienable rights'. There are interpretations that are more correct, sure, but these interpretations aren't the natural interpretation of that piece of text, and it's perfectly reasonable to kinesthetically react to that natural interpretation.
As it's a political document, and not a medical text that it should discuss genetics, I think it's supposed to mean "equal in deserved political importance" -- thus differentiating itself from the monarchies that make some people be born in places of greater political status than others.
But then should it not say "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created politically equal ..."?
I don't know, rhetorical flare? He was trying to rally people around a cause not precisely define a PhD thesis. You have to be densely literal-minded to not realize Jefferson was talking about political and moral equality-- not any other kind of equality.
But they weren't. People had to fight damn hard to gain political equality, such as it is! How about "I say people deserve political equality!"? :P
I think the right way to interpret most 'declarations' is as illocutionary acts. Jefferson is basically saying "If you try to deny us political equality, these enumerated rights and the freedom to start our own nation we're going to shoot you with these here muskets."
Or... "Look at me! Look at me! I'm saying catchy slogans that elicit positive political sentiment. Let me be the boss! Me!"
To be fair, it's not an entirely empty political slogan. He's offering to set up a system where he'll have a chance at being in charge, but there will be some limits on how much in charge he will be.
What about access to resource / opportunity. Also family circumstance / environment / status. All men are not born / created equal.
You're basically saying that kings and aristocrats exist. Everybody knew that (I don't think anyone doubted the physical existence of George III), so it obviously can't have been what the Declaration of Independence meant. Why are we even discussing this?
What the Declaration of Independence seems to mean (to me atleast) is that these dynasties of kings and aristocrats don't exist deservedly or "naturally".
I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. The topic asked for examples of bad logic. The use of the idea "all men are created equal" by people absolving themselves any responsibility for the destitute and failures in societies today is the use of bad logic I was trying to refer too.
This particular idea itself (not the entire declaration of independence), however, is poorly phased and open to ridicule because of its obvious falseness. Political ideas are routinely used and interpreted in ways that demonstate poor or bad lagic. All I was trying to point out was the pained feeling I get when I here someone using and idea like this one to argue an inconsistent and ridiculous position.
I have not been posting long and am beginning to learn very quickly that I need to make my ideas as clear as absolutely possible. (as I would argue the authors of this idea probably should have)
I don't think people are generally using the phrase to mean that for the very reasons that it is so obviously and trivially false if used in that way. The phrase is part of a very famous historical document, and I think the most natural reading is in that original context.
The most natural reading of "all men are created equal" is that it predicates the quality of 'equal' on all men: formally, for all men, 'man' implies 'created equal'. That's what the sentence actually means. Keep in mind that this sentence was brought up as a case of instinctual reaction to bad logic; you may have managed to replace the obvious interpretation with the intended and reasonable one in your instinctual reactions, but for someone without that training it may be entirely accurate for them to respond with "urgh" even if that's not what people actually mean.
You make a good point. This isn't an instance of bad logic exactly; it's an instance of something entirely different to logic that also happens to contain nonsense.
It clearly means that plus "equal in class, without any having an inherent right to rule others."
Thank you, my thoughts exactly.
I think the first one is politically useful if it's interpreted as something like "no one is automatically dispensable".
"Interpretation" creates/is rationality or logic.
How does that square with interpretations being right or wrong? Is that not possible?
Questions of right and wrong are an entirely different arguement. In this case it is not a question of the idea being right or wrong. Its the beleif in the idea while ommiting the obvious flaws. I wouldn't try to argue that anyone writing on this site would use this idea in this way.
What do you think of "gods love is unconditional". No-one seems to have commented on this.
I think "god's love is unconditional" is wrong in exactly the same way, but LessWrong doesn't have as many theists as it does Americans.
I found that hysterical for some reason.
I giggled quite a bit at that statement too.