Appeal: evidence
From Jay Dyer vs Styx Debate Abortion – Pro-Life vs Government Overreach.
- #170825:31tied, awaiting the moderator Jay Dyer epainos: evidence (+1)
The council is split: nothing counts until the moderator decides.
“… again, consequentialist ends justify the means, pragmatic type argument argumentation is the same kind of argumentation that, like, Albert [Alfred] Kinsey would use to justify his, you know, molesting kids and his scientific experimentation…”
Diogenes: Read blind, without being shown any call on this passage. To back the slippery-slope worry about state-enforced bans, S1 cites a specific, checkable real event (an Irish woman denied a medically necessary abortion who then died) rather than leaving the claim as bare assertion.- Aristotle overturn: On the record: S2 has held throughout that abortion is a question of moral absolutes/right-and-wrong rather than pragmatic enforceability, and this line restates that stance by analogy (consequentialism is dangerous) rather than introducing a checkable citation; it does not depart from his position, but it also is not the "evidence" move the call names. The quote and speaker given (S2's Kinsey analogy) do not match the referee's own justification, which describes an entirely different moment and speaker (S1's Irish-woman anecdote at ~13:00). Judged on the actual quoted line, S2 is drawing an analogy between consequentialist reasoning and Kinsey's rationalizations, not citing a checkable fact distinct from a claim; that is argument-by-analogy, not evidence. Neither the quote itself nor the mismatched reasoning supports crediting S2 with "evidence" here.
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "explicit argument", on the same ledger as the callout. Moments earlier Styx had stated a general principle for legalizing abortion: "if it is generally unenforceable to the point where people will bypass that law, I would say don't bother" (19:33). Jay's Kinsey line applies that very principle to a case, child molestation, that is also often undetected and "will happen anyway," to show that unenforceability alone can't be the justifying criterion — a reductio on Styx's own stated rule, not a slur about Styx's character. It passes the ad hominem tests: it is relevant to the premise just voiced, it is grounded in something Styx actually said rather than an invented slight, and it invites rather than forecloses examination, since Styx does engage it (though by adding a new "long precedent" qualifier not in his original statement, rather than defending the unenforceability rule as stated).
- Plato overturn: On the record: Jay Dyer (S2) opened as pro-life on framework/moral-absolutist grounds and has consistently argued that pragmatic/consequentialist arguments for legality don't settle the underlying moral question; the quoted line is his standing objection to Styx's "unenforceable, so legalize" reasoning by analogy to Kinsey. The call's speaker/quote (S2's Kinsey analogy) and its stated justification (a citable real event, the Irish woman's death, cited by S1) are two entirely different claims by two different speakers at different points in the transcript; the reasoning given does not describe the quoted line at all. Read on its own terms, S2's Kinsey comparison is an analogy criticizing consequentialist reasoning, not a citation of a checkable fact distinguishing claim from evidence, so it does not fit the "evidence" label under the rubric.
- Thesmothetes leave: All three judges independently set aside the referee's own stated justification (which plainly describes a different exchange, the Irish-woman anecdote) and instead judged S2's Kinsey line on its own terms; the tie is that Aristotle and Plato read it as analogy that fails to clear "evidence," while Socrates, reading it as a reductio on Styx's just-stated unenforceability principle, credits it as "explicit argument." No listed rule tells a referee-error case apart from a mere fit-to-label dispute, and here the disagreement is exactly that: whether this particular move earns a point and under which category, a judgment call the rubric reserves for the archon rather than any written rule.
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