When we are 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years old etc., we think about moral issues like abortion in particular ways. And, for some, it’s the same way. But, for many of us, our point of view will evolve. At times into its opposite. Why? Because [again, for most of us] we come upon new experiences and/or new relationships and/or new ideas that prompt us to change our minds. And in a world [especially the modern world] bursting at the seams with contingency and chance and change, this becomes more and more common.
Then it comes down to rationalizing our new point of view. Again, most of us will tell ourselves that even though we did change our minds [meaning that we might well change our minds again], that’s okay because we have simply become more sophisticated [or progressive] in our capactity to think things like this through. But we are still convinced that what we do think [here and now] corresponds to the most rational and ethical manner in which to think about it.
Well, that doesn’t work for me. Why? Because contingency, chance and change are at the very heart and the very soul of dasein. And because my new point of view is no less entangled in the manner in which I construe conflicting goods.
Yes. I am not able to imagine an argument [here and now] that would allow me to extricate myself from either dasein or conflicting goods. Such an argument may in fact exist. But that is for all practical purposes irrelevant if I am not able to come across it.
If this frame of mind works for you, I’m glad that it does. If you are able to convince yourself that objective moral values are within your reach, okay. But it does not work that way for me. And that is because it changes nothing about the dilemma as I perceive it to be.
And we do not really have personal values that are “thoroughly subjective”. Rather, in living in a particular community [rooted in historical and cultural parameters], our values are always intersubjective. After all, who really has the capacity wholly extricate “I” from “we”?
But, given the manner in which I construe our value judgments as being profoundly and problematically intertwined in dasein and conflicting goods, this too can only be particular point of view – one ever subject to change in a world of contingency chance and change.
I just think about these relationships in a considerably more precarious manner than most others seem to.
With Nietzsche [who views these things in a world where “God is dead”], one can embrace the brute facticity of might makes right or [as many of his champions/sycophants seem inclined] concoct an elaborate philosophical matrix for behaving in a manner which, through one or another rendition of “will to power”, the strong are able to devise arguments that are said to be rooted in Reason and Virtue and Nobility. Call it the Know Thyself Syndrome.
Thus you rise above the herd not only because you are stronger, but because your behaviors are Just and Righteous. By definition as it were.
On the other hand, to what extent did Nietzsche himself embody the “will to power”. He spent much of his life stumbling into one or another psycho-somatic abyss…and he died insane.