Here I can only extrapolate from my own experience. Whether you approach value judgments in regard to either means or ends, you are going to be more or less comforted and consoled with your own. You are going to be more or less convinced that your own moral narrative/political agenda is in sync with some facsimile of the “real me” in sync with some facsimile of “the right thing to do”.
It is only a question of how fractured and fragmented you actually do feel in, say, embracing or rejecting President Trump’s policies.
From my perspective, I’m curious to explore Rawls’s method for resolving particularly ferocious conflicting goods like abortion. I’m curious to explore how someone like him might react to the manner in which I construe the role that dasein, conflicting goods and political economy play in conflicts like this.
But the only way that I can illustrate this is in discussing an issue like abortion with someone who does employ Rawls’s methods in an attempt to resolve it.
So, give it a go, okay? What on earth does “distributive justice” – plato.stanford.edu/entries/just … tributive/ – mean when applied to the killing of the unborn? or with respect to the role of government? or capital punishment? or tax policy? or poverty around the globe?
All I can do here is to note the manner in which I react to conflicting goods given the extent to which I construe value judgments as existential concoctions rooted in partiuclar historical, cultural and interpersonal interactions that thrive on contingency, chance and change.
And while the objectivists, the deontologists and the idealists among us have a cure for practically everything when conflicts erupt around values, I’m always more intrigued by those who don’t.
They eschew God and political ideology and moral obligations rooted categorically and imperatively in reason, but are somehow able to feel considerably less problematic and precarious than “I” do regarding the values [and the political prejudices] that they finally do take their leap to.
And they will either bring their own thinking – their own “methodology” – into a discussion revolving around both a particular context and set of behaviors or they won’t.
If they feel less “fractured and fragmented” than “I” do here, all the better for them. And it’s not like I spend my whole life agonizing over it myself. I’ve got plenty of distractions to fall back on to make living my life both rewarding and fulfilling.
It’s just something that philosophically has always intrigued me: How ought one to live in a No God world?