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Glossary of terms used on this site or otherwise helpful terms. The first definition listed after each word is the meaning I intend unless it is clear from the context that I mean one of the other definitions. I have listed good definitions for each word and, for fun, I have in some cases listed some bad, rhetorical meanings that some people use. Of course, it is sometimes wrong to use rhetorical definitions because they:
· Create confusion and blur important distinctions.
· Manipulate an audience into conclusions via definition.
· Create apathy and cynicism about the uses of language and arguments.
Manipulate
1. wrongfully influence
2. skillfully influence
Meaning
1. definition
2. purpose
3. worth
4. compelling
Merit
The difference between the quality of motives, efforts, results and the quality of things attributable to unchosen gifts
Middle class
1. individuals between the 50th and 99th percentile in economic resources
Minor factor
1. factor that changes the probability of a result but not by important amounts (example: Substance that that makes most plants grow slightly faster)
2. factor that rarely changes the probability of a result
3. factor that changes the probability of a result by important
amounts, but little or nothing of moral or practical value can be done about the factor; remote factor (example: Volcano thousands of years ago that caused your ancestors to meet)
Moderate
1. someone who borrows bad ideas from a variety of sources
2. half fanatic, half coward
3. a euphemism for slow decay
4. half hedonist, half fanatic
5. too lazy to find out the truth
Monetary policy
governmental bank, interest, money creation and destruction policies
Mono mongering
1. Attaching excessive importance to events (Examples: Kennedy assassination screwed up the country. The Quiz Show scandal equals innocence lost for the nation. The Iran-hostage kidnapping made us what we are.)
Moral
1. the best available alternative in an ethical decision
2. associated with morality
3. main theme
Moral cynicism
refusal or disinclination to entertain or accurately weigh well-reasoned moral arguments or actions
Moral estheticism
1. Beliefs or actions or both that suggest esthetic claims generally outweigh moral imperatives.
2. Beliefs or actions or both that suggest esthetic claims are the only claims that matter.
Moral hazard
increase in probability of immoral choices because the costs of those choices are excessively shifted to other individuals (example: subsidized SUVs)
Moral monism
Using only one criterion to make moral judgments
Moral pluralism
Using more than one criterion to make moral judgments
Moralism
belief that everyone should spend his entire life fulfilling moral duties
Morality
the study and living of the best available life and the things that should be done regardless of inclination; ethics
Morally responsible actions
beliefs and actions by beings who are capable of determining the moral worth of their beliefs and actions, regardless whether they actually do so and regardless whether deterministic forces are acting on them
Motivation
Mental state that alters the probability of or the intensity of an effort or both.
National interest
1. Overall benefit to American citizens
2. What a politician believes is in the best interest of his allies or himself, anti-Americanism masquerading as pro-Americanism.
Natural
1. Produced without human influence.
2. Any government policy that benefits rich people far more than others or benefits rich individuals while harming others.
Natural evil
great harms caused by non-moral beings, objects, and energies
Natural law
1. belief in arbitrary rules that powerful individuals pretend came from God(s)
2. belief in arbitrary moral rules that powerful people pretend came from genes, the natural environment or a higher consciousness
3. arbitrary belief that moral rules are self-evident, absolute or the same as physical laws.
Necessary cause
presence is required for outcome, but it alone does not guarantee outcome.
Need
1. necessary for physical survival
2. beneficial
3. increasing the probability of survival
4. desire
5. necessary for a good life
Negative Hawthorne effect
improvement factors sabotaged by lack of enthusiasm, bad beliefs about innovation and similar attitudes
Noncontradiction, Law of
No specific enough claim in a situation is both true and false
Objective
1. “testable by others”—Mullen
2. arrived at in a sufficiently unbiased manner
3. factual, well-reasoned
4. true, accurate
Obsessed
1. pre-occupied
2. unwanted recurring thought
3. addicted
Obvious
readily apparent to anyone with adequate knowledge and
willingness to face good evidence
Offensive
claims that deviate from mass media beliefs
Particularism
giving weight to the unique characteristics of each moral situation
Paternalism
1. using coercion to treat an individual as if he were less developed than he is or as if he had less potential than he does or both
2. legal coercion violating the rights of an individual when those rights are not outweighed by some other rights or consequences or both
3. condescending attitudes and beliefs
4. having beliefs similar to those of older men in traditional
societies
Philanthropy
1. contributions intended to benefit others
2. contributions that actually benefit others
3. public relations tokenism and manipulation
4. oxygen for self-esteem and self-justification
5. giving to feel-good organizations that had nothing to do with the creation of the wealth while abusing those who helped create the wealth
planning fallacy
pre-disposition to make over optimistic assessments of the time required to finish a task (example: underestimating the time required to create a glossary)
pluralism
1. belief that there are many goods one should pursue for a good life
2. belief that values and actions differ among individuals and one should legally interfere only when major harms result so individuals may pursue experiments in living
3. the mistaken belief that values differ among individuals and that no values are supported by reasoning
4. the mistaken belief that one should never or almost never interfere with others’ actions
5. multiculturalism; the deification of trivial cultural activities or
harmful activities by in-groups or socially admired groups
Policy
everything a government does or does not do, except the use of not legally binding language
Power
1. ability to influence
2. ability to coerce
Power markets
markets that maximize freedoms or benefits for the most wealthy or maximize the gaps between the most powerful and the less powerful; (examples: fixing supply, price fixing, subsidies, cronyism, tax havens, tax shelters, monopolies, bailouts, choosing interest rates so that unemployment is higher than it otherwise would be so wages can be kept low, creating deficits that other people have to pay, creating externalities that other citizens have to pay for, holding no one responsible when a piece of paper called a corporation does something worse than what would get an ordinary citizen thrown in jail or fined, lax securities laws and enforcement, making children, parents and the unborn pay the costs of contracts they never agreed to and so on); sometimes mistakenly referred to as free markets; totalitarian markets
Pragmatism
1. process oriented consequentialism that explores or experiments with many alternatives
2. vague, process oriented consequentialism
3. vague, process oriented, feel-good ethics
4. vague, spineless, feel-good anti-consequentialism and
anti-deontology
Programist
person who believes that “real compassion" and the best way to help individuals requires complex, bureaucratic programs such as job training because working class individuals do not deserve and can not be trusted with wages, vouchers or tax credits.
Propaganda
1. deliberate spreading of evil claims
2. deliberate spreading of fallacious claims
Purposeful
actions with high resolution toward goals
Pyramid power:
Ability of gurus, pundits, scientists, and philosophers to draw boxes, circles, pyramids, diagrams, and flow-charts filled with buzzwords arranged in categories, especially hierarchies. These geometric deformations are presented as self-evident truths and are held together more by geometry than reasoning. (examples: food pyramids, Bloom's taxonomy, Kohlberg's hierarchy, Maslov's pyramid)
Rational choice theory
1. belief that individuals magically choose best available
alternatives, that widespread failures to choose best available alternatives should be ignored because dealing with such matters is hard work and causes anxiety
2. opinion that self-interested choices made by wealthy people are overwhelmingly morally and economically right and should almost never be subject to criticism, incentives, restrictions or other interference. A monetary policy that costs lower income workers jobs or wages, for example, does not violate rational choice theory or “free” markets because it is “right” for government to intervene that way, but “wrong” for government to intervene with childcare vouchers or wage subsidies. See also: power markets.
Rationalism
1. belief that good reasoning is the only road to truth and knowledge
2. mistaken belief that reflection without observation and experience is the source of knowledge
3. mistaken belief that knowledge comes from self-evident expressions
Reactance
tendency to react with disdain, hostility, or even greater misuse of freedoms to those criticizing our use of freedoms
Regression to the mean
tendency for a more typical performance to follow a surprisingly good or bad performance (Example: A quarterback who completes 14 passes in a row in the first half is more likely to complete eight of 14 in the second half than to complete another 14 in a row.)
Remote factor
1. factor that changes the probability of a result by important amounts, but little or nothing of moral or practical value can be done about the factor (example: a volcano millions of years ago that caused the birth of Hitler)
2. factor with a trivial expected value
3. factor that is farther away in time, geography, closeness of relationship
Repression
1. unconsciously trying to get rid of a thought
2. unjust use of force
Respect, minimal
basic regard owed to human beings and other moral beings
Respect, moral
admiration or regard owed in proportion to moral character
Respect, ordinary
admiration or regard for non-moral traits and accomplishments
Responsibility
1. duty
2. blameworthy factor
Reward
1. thing received in reciprocation for something else; recompense; desert
2. external, desired thing used to motivate
3. any result used in calculations of utility
Right
1. best available moral alternative
2. correct, accurate, true
3. factual, well-reasoned
4. a claim that carries some weight in at least one situation that an individual is owed some good or is permitted to act in some manner and that other individuals should provide the good or are not permitted to interfere with the permitted act.
· Almost all rights conflict with other rights.
· Some rights in specific situations are inalienable, they can not be given or taken away, though they may be outweighed by other claims.
· Almost no rights are absolute. Almost all rights can be outweighed by other rights or consequentialist claims or both. I can think of four absolute rights. There are probably more. There are no situations in which they can be outweighed.
· The right to choose the best alternative
· The right to prevent the evil with the worst expected value
· The right to rights
· The right to not be murdered, defining murder as a killing that can never be justified (Other absolute rights can be created by inventing words such as a word that means a theft that can never be justified and so on.)
· All rights come with corresponding duties for the individual who holds the right or for other individuals or both.
Rights
See definition number four under right
Rule
1. explicit or implied prescriptive claim that can be generalized to more than one case
2. a claim that can be generalized to more than one case
Scorn
Mocking derision or contempt (a little scorn may not make fears and anxieties disappear, but in the right spots it is a hell of a lot of fun)
Selective avoidance
tendency to avoid arguments that oppose current beliefs
Self-efficacy
belief in one’s ability to accomplish a task
Selfhood
choosing and acting without seeing yourself as solely or primarily a victim of situations
Selfish
excessive self-interest; greed
Self-mighteous
glib moral self-satisfaction or self-justification or both through
actions of little or no moral merit, over-esteeming one’s beliefs on trivial issues, comparing oneself to vile characters or believing a worse wrong makes a right; examples: hypocrisy fiends, anecdote mongers, busy-ness obsessed, wallowing in victim hood, picayune injustice experts, infotainment moralizers, wallowing in criticizing the wallowers in victim hood, trivial cultural warfare, I’m-good-because-I’m-not-Charles-Mansonitis, I-broke-his-nose-because-the-government-overtaxes-me
Self-righteous:
1. an individual who asserts excessive moral self-regard
2. someone who is morally better than we are, and we want to add evidence to it by insulting them
Self-serving bias
believing your good results are overly due to your good character and your bad results are overly due to external factors
Some
Anything more than none
Soul
1. deeply felt emotion
2. part of a being or re-creation of a being that survives death
Speech-act
language intended to produce action and is communicated to others
Spirit
1. zest
2. affective state that stirs us to enthusiasm and major actions
3. a ghost
Standard
prescription that specifies adequate performance
Straw person
fallacy of distorting an argument or of ignoring the strongest argument
Strength of will
believing you should do X, then making adequate efforts to do X
Strong willed
habits and states of mind that result from consistent strength of will or other factors, making it more likely that one will act with strength of will in the future.
Subjective
1. a cognitive state
2. false
3. any event occurring in consciousness
4. arrived at in a biased manner
5. incapable of being accurate
6. biased
Substitution
a dollar spent one place is a dollar not spent somewhere else
Sufficient cause
factor whose presence always or almost always guarantees outcome.
Suppression
1. consciously trying to rid a thought
2. unwarranted use of force
Task-oriented
goal or results oriented or both, affective states during and after completion are considered less important
Tautology
1. circular claim
2. obvious, worthless, or inane claim that is true (example: the football team with the most points wins)
Tax credit
law that permits one to deduct the dollar amount of the credit from total amount of taxes that would have been paid.
Tax credit, refundable
a tax credit that permits an individual to receive a refund if the tax credit is larger than the taxes that would have been paid, the refund is found by subtracting the credit from the taxes that would have been owed
Trivialization
1. the shift to wasting time and lives on picayune matters
2. reducing cognitive dissonance by believing the issues involved in contradictory beliefs and actions are unimportant.
Ultraconservatism
1. various ideologies that believe in some form of power markets, demonization of non-evil opponents, and promotion of market claims over moral claims (examples: neoconservatism, so-called libertarianism)
2. long, slow hedonism
3. the belief that the primary goal of government should be increasing the incomes of the rich and reducing the incomes of others.
4. the belief that the rights of corporations outweigh the rights of individuals.
Ultraliberalism
Various Marxisms
Understand
1. knowledge plus awareness of implications
2. comprehend
Unfreakable
acting strong and seeking clarity, no matter the chaos and challenges
Universal
applies to all moral beings and potential moral beings in the same or sufficiently similar situations
Universalism
Giving equal initial consideration to all individuals and attempting to give each individual the moral weight they are owed. Universalism is not to be confused with giving equal weight to all regardless of how bad their beliefs and behavior. Universalism rejects the use of unchosen, irrelevant characteristics such as height or skin color in making moral decisions. The same does not apply to religions. Religions are chosen and are open to the same moral criticism or praise as nonreligious ideologies.
Vague
1. unclear meaning
2. too unspecific for the situation
3. too unclear and too unspecific
Value
1. worth
2. moral belief
3. belief
4. standard
Value claim
a claim that a thing “is good, bad, better or worse”—Mullen
Victimhood, cult of
political correctness gone wild, confusing real or imagined slights with major oppression
Victimhood, supercult of
neoconservatives and so-called libertarians who constantly whine about anecdotes of political correctness gone berserk and how these anecdotes horribly victimize them and how these anecdotes are the leading cause of societal ruin, mainly to gain votes, entertain the masses and distract citizens from more important matters and how often conservatives horribly victimize others. (Example: A sweat shop owner who feels oppressed because he can't smoke in a resaurant.)>
Virtue
1. habit orientated philosophy of ethics
2. goodness
3. character
Weak willed
apathetic habits and states of mind that result from consistent
weakness of will or other factors, making it harder to act with strength of will in the future
Weakness of will
believing you should do X, then not making adequate efforts to do X
Will
Consciously overriding beliefs or behaviors or both with other beliefs or behaviors or both.
Willful
determined impulsiveness
Wisdom
sufficient subject knowledge plus creativity in applying it, knowledge of the value of the subject knowledge, knowledge of the its relationship to other areas of knowledge, plus ability to analyze arguments and ability to make well-reasoned choices
Working Class
employed individuals below the 50th percentile in economic resources
Work Ethic
belief that work has value beyond the goods and services produced
Wrong
1. an alternative other than the best available alternative
2. false, mistaken, erroneous, untrue, inaccurate, hokey smoke
3. evil
—J.T. Fournier, last updated March 12, 2009