Proving What We Already "Know"

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, I suppose we're dealing with a particular formal definition of "coherence" as well, as this certainly doesn't meet the criteria for literary coherence.  Any child capable of understanding that syllogism would immediately start asking questions about what it means to harm a mountain, or how somebody can know that's "bad."

People ask questions about coherent things, that's good - and one wonders what the point of asking questions about incoherent things would be, anyway.

I can tell you what I think will happen in practice with this kind of argument.  It won't come in little sets like this that are clear bullshit.  It will come in complex chapters of big fat hardcover text books with "Harvard phD" written on the cover, mentioning perhaps a couple dozen other like works in the first chapter and implying "Read all these, or you won't really be qualified to comment on what follows."  It then will present all kinds of "facts," like charts about American strip mining correlated with budgie deaths in the Netherlands or something.   But in the end, if it takes 500 pages to answer a simple question, you're probably not answering the question at all.

You would interpret a 500 page report on all of the ways that mountaintop removal mining is harmful as not answering the question of how it was harmful?  

The biggest fear of bullshit-mongers is that some simple moron like me will step into the room and say: "Yea, but. . . why is it bad?"  And then the author will have nothing left to do but hysterically gesture toward his 500 pg. book, which if you read closely enough might as well be titled, "Why the Emperor's New Clothes are Not Only Real but Also Super-Important."  All the face-plant memes in the world won't obscvure the fact that the question is unanswerable in any way that doesn't beg the question.

Yes, nothing left to do but point to 500 pages worth of reasons to make the statement.

While you perceive this to be a dilemma of some kind - that would be pretty much a best case scenario for any realist statement..about morality or anything else. A very large set of factual data to refer to. In an objective morality, the more you know, the more accurate and specific your moral statements can be. If you wanted to consider the issue of mountaintop removal mining, it would help to have a subject matter expert. The subject in question this time has gone through alot of revision and regulation precisely because of reports like that. We can still doubt that the first premise as I wrote it is sound or the syllogism as expressed is factually complete. We can do this by saying, for example, that the things about mountaintop removal mining that we refer to when calling it harmful can either be done some other way, that these specific harms can be mitigated, or remediated. Or, if we prefer, we could accept that mountaintop removal mining was itself harmful, but that the alternatives were more so and thus, mountaintop removal mining is a mitigation of some greater and more general harm.

In practice..and with respect to mountaintop removal mining - we do both (then ultimately and inconsistently defer to the almighty dollar, ofc).