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This might sound initially like a too-clever undergrad ‘gotcha’ paradox. However, I think that at least for some folks who have perfectionist tendencies, the following is experienced as a genuine difficulty in their lives.
The following strikes me as plausible:
(1) It’s OK to make some mistakes.
If (1) is true, then it seems the following should be true as well, since it’s just a restricted version of (1):
(2) It’s morally OK to make some moral mistakes.
But
(3) Making a moral mistake is doing something morally impermissible,
and
(4) if something is morally OK, then it is morally permissible.
And (2)-(4) logically entail
(C) It’s morally permissible to do some morally impermissible things.
And (C) looks like a contradiction.
(For all I know this is already out there somewhere, but it was not on the interesting list of paradoxes of deontic logic in the Stanford Encyclopedia.)
4 comments:
I don't understand how the truth of (1) implies the truth of (2).
Consider the following analogical
(1)It is OK to eat some meat
(2) It is morally ok to eat some human meat
One could very well accept the truth of (1) while not accepting the truth of (2). This case seems to me to be structurally the same as the one you present. Or am i missing something?
Hi Karim --
Thanks! I think you are 100% correct. This was a logical mistake on my part. I completely rescind the claim that (1) is evidence for (2). (And I'm going to edit the post accordingly now.)
Gratefull for sharing this
The apparent contradiction is due to the words "It's OK."
When we say "It’s OK to make mistakes," what we mean is "We understand how it can happen." For example, we see how someone can make a mistake, because they are human. But that doesn't change the fact that it was a mistake.
What’s “OK” here is more about our attitude toward the person who made the mistake, not the moral status of the mistake itself. So "it's okay" can mean either:
(A) we understand how this can happen, or
(B) it's not a problem that it has happened.
And the apparent contradiction is caused because of interpreting it as (B), rather than (A).
What do you think?
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