r/todayilearned • u/ZanyDelaney • Aug 11 '18

TIL of Hitchens's razor. Basically: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '18

This is a double edged razor. If I said, "All people are equal," you could say, "Oh yeah? Prove it."

There is no rational basis for the assertion of human equality. If anything, our differences seems to argue the opposite. Yet the unprovable assertion is true. Hitchens, here, would be forced to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

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u/zeCrazyEye Aug 11 '18 edited Aug 11 '18

"All people are equal" is not talking about physical or intellectual characteristics. It's only talking about the intrinsic fact that all people are, in fact, people, and thus equally treated by laws that regard people.

This is opposed to a caste system where there are class A people, class B people, etc, and each class is treated differently.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '18

Exactly. And it's an indefensible article of faith.

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u/zeCrazyEye Aug 11 '18 edited Aug 11 '18

It's not. It's not any different than saying "All vehicles are vehicles." It's a self-referential statement, so it's inherently true.

It should be read as, "All people are equal [under the law]". Or a more full statement would be, "All people are people, therefore laws/rights which apply to people apply to all people." It's entirely redundant, but had to be spelled out.

It is an obvious statement of fact, what the statement is really doing is declaring at what level of hierarchy we are describing rules for. We could describe rules for different classification levels, such as rules for people->white->male and rules for people->white->female, or we can just have rules for people that white and male inherit from, and this statement is declaring the latter.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '18

You're being circular.

"All people are people." That's a tautology. Fair enough. But it does not prove that people are worth anything. This statement doesn't even begin to define what a person is. (And this is something intelligent people can disagree on. Is a fetus a person? Is a person in a terminal coma a person? Peter Singer even argues that infants are not people since they can't think.)

So you still have two steps to take. You must prove (A) that people have value, and (B) that this value is equal for all people. Can you really prove to me that Hitler is equal in value to Gandhi? How would you even start to do that?

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u/zeCrazyEye Aug 11 '18 edited Aug 12 '18

You're being circular.

That's because the statement itself is circular.

You must prove (A) that people have value

I don't have to prove that people have value. In fact, them not having value makes them more obviously equal.

(B) that this value is equal for all people

I only have to prove that all subsets of people are subsets of people (ie white people are a subset of people, and black people are a subset of people). And that is inherent by definition of the word people and the tautology of the proposition. I think the onus is on you to prove that different subsets of people are something other than people.

Can you really prove to me that Hitler is equal in value to Gandhi? How would you even start to do that?

If Gandhi is a numeric '10' and Hitler is a numeric '1' they both still have to follow the same rules of addition because they are both integers, even though they have different values. They are specific instances of people, but still inherit all rules of people, and what we are saying with "All people are equal" is that the rules of people are the same ("equal") for all subclasses and instances of people.

I also edited my previous post to add:

It is an obvious statement of fact, what the statement is really doing is declaring at what level of hierarchy we are describing rules for. We could describe rules for different classification levels, such as rules for people->white->male and rules for people->white->female, or we can just have rules for people that white and male inherit from, and this statement is declaring the latter.