
Motte and Bailey Doctrines - Plasmoid
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/
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eru
Compare [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-
bric...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-
motte/)

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talideon
This analogy irritates me because it's based around a misunderstanding of what
the 'bailey' is: the bailey is within the motte; it's not the surrounding
lands. I can only assume that the writer is confusing the motte with the keep
or something.

~~~
cjg
Not according to wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-
bailey_castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_castle)

"A motte-and-bailey castle was made up of two structures, a motte, a type of
mound–often artificial–topped with a wooden or stone structure known as a
keep; and at least one bailey, a fortified enclosure built next to the motte."

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tomlock
This is a pretty confusing definition and argument. How does the author
distinguish between Morality and "our beliefs about right and wrong"? The
author seems to be appealing to universal objective truths, while waving away
the notion that these truths are necessarily bound to human understandings of
them.

If everyone called a tail a leg, it would be a leg. That's exactly how
languages, and the truths surrounding languages, work and evolve!!!

~~~
henrikschroder
Perhaps call it a bait & switch doctrine? The bait is an exciting proposition,
but when you press the author for details, they perform the switch, and what's
left is not really exciting anymore.

As for the example using morality, the whole point of absolute morality
systems is that moral statements have a truth value independent of human
"observation", and in such a world, the sentence "morality is socially
constructed" means that the truth values of moral statements are socially
constructed, which is exciting! But the switch or the motte in this case is
that the author didn't mean that, they were talking about people's perception
of morality the whole time, and it is a truism that perople's perception of
morality is socially constructed, and that is boring.

Compare for example how exciting the proposition that objective reality is
shaped by our thoughts (MAGIC!!!), vs the proposition that our subjective
experience of reality is shaped by our thoughts (BORING!).

~~~
wisty
It's almost the opposite of bait and switch.

In the motte and bailey, the "bailey" is put front and center and only
abandoned when a more defensible position when under attack ("everything is
subjective").

In "bait and switch" the bait is put front and center, but it isn't the
position that you want to take, it's one that's used to lure in new recruits
("learn how to learn!").

In some cases, the "motte" and the "bait" might be the same thing - a good
bait can also be easy to defend, but not all philosophically defensible
positions are particularly attractive.

~~~
henrikschroder
> It's almost the opposite of bait and switch.

Yes, you are completely right, and I was wrong.

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digi_owl
I swear i have seen this in play regarding a certain open source project...

