What I was basically agreeing with was your point that “[m]orality is not fundamentally about what is true.”
Fundamentally in the sense that the might is said to be justified because it reflects the moral obligation of all rational and/or just people. Then you have all of the historical renditions of this. Lenin with his Communist Manifesto, Hitler with his Mein Kampf, Mussolini with his fascism, Mao with his Cultural Revolution.
Or there are those who skip that part and impose their will simply because they have the political and economic and military and police wherewithal to impose it.
And while there are behaviors in any particular human community that can be described accurately as “morally aberrant”, who is to say which behaviors all rational men and women are in fact obligated to choose?
Yep, that’s how it works alright. At least in those jurisdictions that practice one or another rendition of democracy and the rule of law. And not those who are in a position to dictate how all citizens are required to view state executions. Re God or one or another ideological dogma or one or another philosophical assessment. And certainly not in communities where for all practical purposes it’s the law of the jungle.
In my view, human interactions are ever and always embedded in an actual historical and cultural or experiential context. Out in a world where contingency, chance and change are always right around the corner.
Then further in my view it comes down to how any particular one of us implicates that in our own lives.
Again, that’s my point. That and the part about any actual flesh and blood “I” out in any actual flesh and blood world being at the intersection – the existential intersection – of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
In any specific context.
This is precisely the argument I make when confronting the moral and political objectivists among us. There are simply far, far, far too many variables intertwined in any number of actual social, political and economic contexts to ever realistically suppose that some sort of deontological prescription can reflect the ethical equivalent of “one size fits all”.
But: whether accomplishing it is a waste of time it doesn’t change the fact that one way or another rules of behaviors must be proposed and then legislated in any given human community. And then enforced.
Again, it is here where I argue that “I” is largely an intersubjective agglomeration of value judgments out in a particular world of conflicting points of view derived from the actual trajectory of ones life experiences.
And not from God or ideology or reason or logic or views of nature. Not from the intellectual assumptions of folks like Plato or Aristotle of Descartes or Kant.
But that in turn is merely how “I” have come to view this existentially here and now given all the variables that came together in my own life. Many of which are surely beyond my understanding and control.
When have I ever argued that any one of us ought to care about any of this? It’s just that down through the ages there have been any number of folks who called themselves philosophers who took it upon themselves to care about it.
And what I propose we do here is to take their words, their ideas, their concepts, their theories, their intellectual contraptions down out of the “general description” clouds, and stick them out in the world that we live in here and now. As this revolves around the question “how ought one to live”?
My point is that with respect to an issue like capital punishment, there do not appear to be any objective solutions that philosophers, using the tools at their disposal, can provide us with.
Then [for me] it’s probing how others are not down in the hole that I am in when confronting this.
I propose first and foremost that my values here are embedded in the points I bring up here:
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Then I ask others how this frame of mind is not applicable to them. Given a particular context that most here are likely to be familiar with and to have thought about.
Yet another “general description” in which the supposed “errors” that philosophers have made are not fleshed out in regards to an issue like capital punishment.
Again, errors [or truths] that revolve around the part where logic and rational thinking and morality are grappled with “in reality”.