I recall that same lesson, the one Michael refers to below. But I learned it in a high school sociology class.
Also Miller says that "self-indulgence" is not a way to excellence. The trouble i have with that term, self-indulgence, is that the emphasis is on a pejorative sense and not on the fact that all personal acts require a degree of selfness and self-privileging. Further, even if we admit the pejorative condition, we can't say that it ruins excellence because causality is not always linear; the if-then proposition is only as good as the knowledge of the internal sharing of some property common to both parts of the proposition. Unfortunately, we can never know, with total assurance, the complete sharing between two sides of a proposition the "if" side and the "then" side. Thus we can admit that in some cases there may be a very nasty sort of self-indulgence that does in fact lead to excellence, however it is defined. Miller's reasoning in this instance was affected by his faulty a-priori assumption that a bad means cannot lead to a good end. We can never fully know what a bad means is, or how much bad is in any means or how much does it take to produce a bad end, etc., etc. The if-then proposition is only good within carefully defined, highly limited parameters. wc "Is told"? Who does the telling? That's just poor teaching, frankly. I learned in high school to discern fallacious, illogical, or erroneous arguments. Argumentation was part of composition classes, as a matter of fact, and we were shown how to recognize such ploys as appeals to authority, vanity, fear, etc., what we called "glowing generalities," irrelevant facts, non sequiturs, etc. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected] http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/ http://thinkinglikeadesigner.blogspot.com/ Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected]
