http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/39465-evil-and-the-man-ethics-versus-empirical-history/

The relationship between personal integrity and moral theorizing has always been challenging, and is arguably the most essential problem for modern philosophy to unravel and resolve.

Incorrect moral theories can be justly viewed as the greatest viruses to ever attack the human species -- theories such as communism, fascism and other forms of totalitarian socialism -- as well as generic nationalism -- have caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings in the 20th century alone. It is hard to think of any biological virus with a similar death count, except perhaps the black death of the early Middle Ages, which spread through the extreme and unsanitary poverty which resulted from the catastrophic moral and economic theories of monarchy and feudalism.

I have argued for many years that first we look to the man, and then we look to his theories. As a result, I have been endlessly accused of committing the logical fallacies of ad hominem and tu quoque. The ad hominem fallacy is an attempt to discredit a theory by attacking the theoretician, i.e. "Your argument is invalid because you are ugly." Tu quoque is the fallacy of rejecting a moral theory due to the hypocrisy of the moralist. If a slave owner argues that slavery is immoral, we cannot reject the immorality of slavery because the moralist owns slaves.

However, while it is a fallacy to reject a moral theory due to the moral hypocrisies of the theorist, there are two components to rejecting a theory. The first is to prove that the theory is necessarily and universally false, and the second is to reject the competence of the theorist.

There are three arguments which support examining the moralist prior to examining his or her moral theories; the first is practical, and almost universally understood and practiced, while the second is logical, and not well understood as yet. The third will be examined at the end of this article.

The importance of the relationship between personal integrity and moral theorizing cannot be overstated. If we could have rationally excluded from the philosophical discourse of mankind the number of moralists who were themselves deeply immoral, we would have saved the world from, at a bare minimum, Communism and Nazism, whose death count rose above 100 million innocent people. Evil ethicists are the holocaust of humanity; if philosophy can be the instant sunlight to their endless vampirism, it could save more lives than all the doctors who have ever lived...

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