Right. Like in discussing President Trump’s immigration policy there are clearly distinct lines to be drawn between political theory and political practice.
Culminating in actual [and hopelessly conflicting] moral narratives embodied by folks up and down the political spectrum.
How then is it determined when serious philosophers have a role to play in, say, discussing immigration policy re the upcoming presidential election in the US?
Imagine, for example, a professional philosopher coming upon this site: immigration.procon.org/
Where would she draw the line between, “relevant to philosophy, irrelevant to philosophy?”
It’s also an argument based on morality: what if he starts doing immoral things because he doesn’t know the way to objectively determine the good.
Immoral things? And, with respect to immigration policy, what might they be? How is it determined [using the tools of philosophy] what the “good” is here?
How does the pragmatist determine that other than by taking a particular subjective leap to a particular set of political prejudices that are rooted in the life that he has lived?
And what does he do when he recognizes that the arguments of those opposed to his own “here and now” point of view don’t go away as a result of the arguments that he makes?
Implicitly understood: Iambiguous right now is avoiding doing immoral things, unlike others. IOW he unlike Faust is trying to do good, help the world, rather than just play language games.
This is simply preposterous. My whole argument rests on the assumption that in a No God world, I am unable to determine what it means to choose good or bad behaviors…in any particular context understood by any one particular point of view. The part where I have thought myself into being drawn and quartered…into a hole [in the is/ought world] I am not able to extricate myself from.
Only I acknolwedge in turn that my own thinking here is no less problematic. There may well be a way in which to determine this.
And then of course “resolving” these conflicting narratives by making me issue:
Which is an odd, hence primarily implicit, claim for an existentialist. Odder still, he does, in fact, precisely what he seems to be almost threatening to do…he interacts here - in what I think is his only community - in the manner of someone choosing behaviors based on what he perceives to be his own best interests. How otherwise can he get out of his hole, he repeatedly asks rhetorically. His impetous is to get out of the hole. And yet, at the same time, he takes the higher moral ground. There were so many ironies in his previous post it boggles the mind.
Again, choose a context, a set of behaviors.
I’ll note the manner in which I approach them given my far more problematic understanding of pragmatism, and you can note how your own pragmatism of choice has allowed for a considerably less turbulent reaction to conflicting goods.