And the more absurd the point they are rationalizing, the greater their sense of accomplishment and superiority. Anyone can prove what is patently obvious but as an intellectual exercise it is more interesting and you get more notice when you can build a case for the absurd.
And the more absurd the point they are rationalizing, the greater their sense of accomplishment and superiority. Anyone can prove what is patently obvious but as an intellectual exercise it is more interesting and you get more notice when you can build a case for the absurd.the problem is education sometimes takes the ability to reason and transforms it into the ability for rationalization - tophat9000
. . . which is what you might expect of a Sophist.And yet, in the face of this self-evident truth—that objective moral standards exist—universities continue to teach that morality (especially sexual morality) is man-made and varies wildly from culture to culture. The sophists of ancient Greece taught this as well, and they were just as wrong as their academic heirs today. In the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle rose up to dash the sophists' ethical house of cards, but over the last two centuries, relativism has returned with a vengeance. True, there have been many brave souls in academia (C. S. Lewis was one of them) who have spoken out against this resurgent relativism, but the majority chooses to remain silent or even to propagate the lie that morality is a human invention.IMHO claims of “journalistic objectivity” are inherently sophistry, because nobody can know that they themselves - or anyone they agree with - is objective. IMHO journalists use the term “objective” as a code for “wise,” knowing that the Sophists were defeated by the Philosophers on precisely that point.