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Re:Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an ... by cliveowen on Sunday January 19, 2014 @11:11AM (#7084808)
Sure, taking things to the extremes has been proved to be the best way to start a discussion and the only sure way to show an unbiased view of the facts at hand.

I'm impressed by your incredible level-headedness, sir.

Re:Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an ... by aaronem on Sunday January 19, 2014 @11:33AM (#7084872)
Well, and who better than you to decide what's biased and what's not? And what could be more level-headed than to say that "[the matter at hand] makes me sick to my stomach"?

Leaving snark aside, it seems telling that both your leveller's bias, and your repellent pride in same, are entirely compatible in your own mind with the sort of "let's all be grown-ups here, shall we?" pose you take one comment later. "Unbiased" and "level-headed", it seems, mean exactly what you define them to mean, and you define them to mean being entirely in agreement with how you yourself regard these matters. I find this rather marvelous, or would if it weren't so lamentably common.

Re:Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an ... by superpatosainz on Sunday January 19, 2014 @11:47AM (#7084917)
Sir, if I preoperly recall, that's exactly how you discard premises. Taking a premise and applying it to a more extreme situation just battletests it. It's done in justice and law courses, etc.

"If the common good justifies killing X agent, then it must be ok for a doctor to kill a patient in their sleep, take his organs and save three people with his two kidneys and heart."

Also, what Yale did wasn't right, and the students just defend themselves... If, for example, you were robbed wouldn't you care? "Oh but there are thousands more people poorer than me, I shouldn't bother".

Re:Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an ... by iamdave on Sunday January 19, 2014 @12:19PM (#7085034)
"If the common good justifies killing X agent, then it must be ok for a doctor to kill a patient in their sleep, take his organs and save three people with his two kidneys and heart."

Isn't that a variation of a semantic shift fallacy? [1]

--- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

Re:Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an ... by vanattab on Sunday January 19, 2014 @12:28PM (#7085056)
I just read the link and I am not following your reasoning. Please explain.
Re:Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an ... by wfn on Sunday January 19, 2014 @11:48PM (#7087632)
Just an FYI: that wiki link does not seem to lead to an article about the fallacy in question, or any kind of fallacy for that matter. You might have been thinking about the continuum fallacy[1], false equivocation, straw man, or red herring. In any regard, I agree that the reasoning in question falls within the bounds of one or other informal fallacies[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

Re:Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an ... by justjimmy on Monday January 20, 2014 @02:07AM (#7088003)
"Taking a premise and applying it to a more extreme situation just battletests it. It's done in justice and law courses, etc."

I'm really interested in this sentence/concept - is there a term for this or anywhere I can read more about the concept behind this statement?

Re:Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an ... by superpatosainz on Wednesday January 22, 2014 @09:55PM (#7106791)
I based that statement on what I saw in Michael Sandel's HarvardX (edX partner) Justice course. There's a lot of thought experiments and hypothetical situations premises are tested against to see if they still hold to be moral; really interesting.