My main aim here is to nudge – spin – the discussion in this direction:
How might Rawls’s “method” be applicable with respect to the killing of the unborn? While I don’t pretend to understand metaphysically how any particular abortion is related to a complete understanding of existence itself, it seems reasonable to me to suggest that with respect to the law, political power and moral narratives, “distributive justice” is either more or less effective in responding to my point that value judgments are rooted in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
We? What “we” do here and now is to be the default in evaluating what others have done, do otherwise or ever will do? You simply exclude any and all religious or political or philosophical narratives that don’t overlap with the U.S. Constitution? And what does this document tell us about the existential relationship between “distributive justice” and abortion? Or, say, the Second Amendment. How might Rawls’s “methods” be applicable here?
Which is clearly not your aim.
And how are these “received [dictated] values” not in sync with their own understanding of how they are expected to behave on this side of the grave in order to be judged by God as worthy of both immortality and salvation on the other side of it? It is all about coordinating their existing life – the behaviors they choose – with their own particular religious assumptions about sin.
They are the particular factors in your life that predispose you to one rather than another set of value judgments. They range from the historical and cultural context in which you are born and raised to the actual personal experiences, relationships and access to ideas that shape and mold any particular “I” out in a particular world.
They are encompassed in more detail in my contributions on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
The difference clearly revolves around the precision. The language that the doctor uses in performing the abortion is wholly in sync with human biology, human sexuality and an unwanted pregnancy. What of the language that Rawls might use in describing the abortion wars in terms of “distributive justice”?
So you keep insisting. But from my frame of mind you are just one more didacticist aiming to steer the discussion up into the clouds of “analysis”. To address your points is basically to go there with you. And, to the extent that you are adament that your points reflect philosophy at its finest, one must also agree with your points.
I’ve adressed this before. Show me how Rawls’s “method” would be instructive in regard to the components of my own narrative here. And bring that “method” down to earth by focusing in on how “for all practical purposes” “distributive justice” is relevant to an issue like abortion or gun control or gender norms or the role of government. I don’t want a summary, I want the text to be illustrated.
Okay, so how does Rawls’s methods [and his conclusions] effectively work to resolve them? And my chief aim in discussions like this has always revolved around objectivism. And the hole that I am in given the manner in which I construe “I” at the intersection of identity, value judgments and political economy.
Aside from the thousands upon thousands of them out in the world that we actually live in? And who are we with respect to conflicting goods but two more of them. Your intellectual contraptions and “general descriptions” may be of no use to them, but this tells us more about you than them in my view.
As yet another general description of “serious philosophy”? No doubt nothing at all in the hallowed halls. But what on earth [aside from logic and rationality relating strictly to the rules of language] does that really have to do with a “sound argument” made to those outside the abortion clinic exchanging their own rendtions of “the good”?
Are you actually going to argue that any discussion/debate we have here is not profoundly embedded in a whole and complete understanding of existence itself?!
That Rumsfelds observation…
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
…is irrelevant to which of us comes closest here to pinning “the human condition” down?!!
I’m more than willing to leave that up to others. Let them make up their own mind regarding the best way to connect the dots between “I” and “all there is”. Or to simply dismiss it as…trivial?
Sure, maybe that will help.