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BerryPick6 comments on Empirical claims, preference claims, and attitude claims - Less Wrong Discussion
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Full Disclosure: I'm still not sure I really understand how definitions and differing opinions on definitions are treated and handled here at LW, so if you could enlighten me in this area in general, I'd really appreciate it.
That being said, I'm positive I've seen people use the word murder even when they believed the act was justified. Obviously, had they used the words 'unjustified killing', there would be very little room for argument, but be that as it may, I'm still not positive that 'murder' has to be / is usually defined as 'unjustified killing'.
Further, I think it is a fairly consistent position to not believe that things can be 'unjustified', define 'murder' as something like 'killing without explicit consent of victim' and believe in murder at the same time; I'm not seeing anything wrong with holding that kind of position.
Ideally, the sides of a debate figure out whether there is a substantive or definitional dispute. Personally, I think there is value in figuring out the most useful definition for a particular conversation, but I'm not sure if that is the local consensus.
There is pretty widespread consensus that arguing by definition is not productive in figuring out what is true.
The standard approach is to:
In your opinion, am I having a definitional dispute with people in this thread, or are we disagreeing about something else?
Yes, starting here. Decius is just noting that murder means "unjustified killing" and so claims about the wrongness of murder are tautological.
Ah, so I guess my dispute is not with him, rather with Peterdjones. I just don't believe that 'murder', as Decius is defining it, ever happens. Also, how this is at all relevant to the matter we were discussing earlier is still somewhat unclear to me.
Anyway, thank you, this has been most helpful.
That's a pretty clear case of using the word wrong, unless you're getting into really fine distinctions. If you spot someone doing that, it's probably worth pointing out that most people would be confused by using the word that way.
In a particular context, you might want to make use of the distinction between unjustified killing and unlawful killing, in which case murder would be the latter.
I'm certainly not confused when someone uses 'murder' without meaning 'unjustified killing'. Is this just me?
EDIT: See the discussion me and thomblake just had