My point however is this: that the answers mere mortals give when asked very concrete moral questions revolve around the manner in which I constue the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. As that pertains existentially to actual conflicted behaviors that most here are likely to be familiar with.
And, in acknowledging that my own narrative is in turn merely an existential contraption, I am clearly suggesting that, while I might yank others down into the hole I am in, they may well succeed in yanking me up out of it.
First, though, they need to describe for me contexts in which they are convinced that they are not down in it already.
Thus, with regard to an issue like abortion, I root the evolution of my own value judgments in the manner in which I construe the meaning of “I” here:
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
In other words, as an existential contraption rooted in a particular sequence of actual experiences.
Then it becomes a matter of forging a philosophical argument in reaction to that. An argument that is able to transcend it such that a moral narrative can be derived able to be demonstrated as applicable to all rational [and virtuous] men and women when confronted with their own unwanted pregnancy.
From my frame of mind, it’s not a question of whether “the hole” here makes the world better or worse, but whether [in the is/ought world] it is reasonable to believe that it exists.
But my philosophy here is no less an existential contraption. I start with the assumption that it is rooted in the components that are embedded in my own rendition of moral nihilism, in my own rendition of a No God world.
So, sure, there certainly may well be a way in which to know necessarily what is a good or bad, a right or a wrong behavior.
I simply ask those who embrace this to demonstrate why all rational men and women are obligated to share their own moral narrative and their own political agenda.
If you were never not going to provide me with this new information and I was never not going to react to it as I do, well, what exactly does that tell us about this exchange?
“Dualism” applies here such that the conscious human brain is either able to embody these change in whatever manner one construes the meaning of “autonomous”, or dualism itself is just another illusion embedded in the only way that anything can ever interact with anything else.
Period.
Unless of course there is a God who created all of this in such a way that no mere mortal will ever by privy to how or why He did it.