As many of you might already know, I am no stranger to arguing. If you've been in an argument with me then you know how I usually do it. I don't always win but a lot of the time I get some good ideas out there. One of the things I hate the most in arguments got pulled on me today and to be honest this kind of argument pisses me off.
I mean of course the argument of Don't knock it till you try it, this is not a valid argument. More often than not its used when in conjunction with sexual discussion. Let me throw the scene out there for you. I was talking about something with someone on a forum and the subject of threesomes came up. I simply said that this is not something that I would ever want to do because I don't have a desire to be with more than one person at a time and even if I did when you think about it, in a relationship if someone is looking to have sex with others doesn't that bring up questions about the relationship itself.
My main argument against the don't knock it till you try it mentality is that it can be used to defend anything. Let's say for instance that I am an avid member of NAMBLA, if someone were to tell me that sex with little boys was wrong I could easily say "Don't knock it till you try it."
Another good example is drugs, we're always told not to try things like drugs and cigarettes. But hey if we employ the don't knock it till you try it mentality then we should all give drugs a fair shot? Right.
Why not just give everything a fair shot, let's all try rape...or incest maybe, how about we kill a person, or burn down a small house...hey don't knock it until you try it. We can't jump on Hitler because how many of us here have gassed Jews or committeed mass genocide?
Hey, don't knock it till you try it right?
I hope we can see how this argument is utterly silly and its the dumbest way to argue anything except taste in food...
2 comments:
well, there's a flaw. you can't use it to defend actions which cause harm or have victims. clearly there's a problem there. it doesn't make logical sense to use the argument that way, and of course nobody does.
the rest of the things you might use such an argument to defend are things which, truly, if it doesn't cause obvious harm to yourself or others, then i see that the argument DOES work. i might say 'well it is patently silly to eat popcorn with barbecue sauce, anybody can see that even without trying it,' but indeed you SHOULD try it before you know for sure that it is a bad or good idea. (actually, that turns out to be rather tasty.)
there is a slippery slope, when we start drawing arbitrary lines.
Yeah but who is to say that things like threesomes don't cause harm to the mind and the psyche? I mean obviously I've never had one and I am pretty sure you haven't either, but who's to say if we went out and did that tomorrow that we wouldn't be harmed in the head.
Which can sometimes be the worst kind of harm because you wouldn't know it even happened.
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