Last time we tried this was in my I don’t get Buddhism thread, where I had to pretend to be a Buddhist in order to play your game. This time I’d like to stick with something I really am, something I believe. So let’s see… how 'bout judging people. I believe hardly anyone has the right (morally or otherwise) to judge another person given how little we know about what it’s like to be anyone but ourselves. I find people who are quick to judge (especially with a kind of know-it-all arrogance that betrays a self-attributed righteousness) despicable. ← That should be an easy one to sink your teeth into. God knows I can be a hypocrite when it comes to (pre-)judging people. I don’t think I could escape it. If I could, I don’t think I’d have a right to call myself human. But the moments when I do (prejudge) are the moments when I feel the least enlightened.
There’s also no rock solid ground on which to draw the line between an obvious moral prejudice against other people (ex. anti-vaxers should all die) and a mere knee jerk assessment about a person (ex. I’ll bet that person’s an anti-vaxer). So I’m sure that will come up a few times.
We might also get into questions about conflicting moral rights–ex. my right to defend myself, or others, versus my obligation to refraining from judging (to judge someone as a child rapist, for example, if I felt they were a danger to my children). Would we have to make exceptions for that? And what would be your challenge there?
So whadya say Biggy? Opportunities like this come only once in a lifetime. Better snatch this up quick before I change my mind. You pick a context and we’ll see how well my morality fairs against your attempts to dismantle it and pull the rug from under my delicate ‘I’.
Look, you’ve got to understand that unlike you I am often involved in multiple discussions with others here. And then there is my commitment here to these threads:
Right now, I’m focused on responding to Maia. Be patient. After all, as I note time and again, on average, I only commit myself to a few hours a day “doing philosophy”
Everyone here knows the one that I will choose: abortion.
To wit: It revolves around life and death, virtually everyone is familiar with it, it’s almost always in the news.
And, again, it is the issue that ultimately reconfigured me [philosophically and otherwise] from a moral and political objectivist to a moral and political nihilist.
Okay, all up and down the political spectrum, women who obtain abortions and doctors who perform them are judged. Some with great sympathy and support and others great disdain and opposition.
Now here’s my argument…
The judgments we make about abortion are rooted subjectively in 1] our indoctrination as children and/or 2] the actual experiences we have with abortion over the course of the uniquely personal life we lived.
That, in other words, there does not appear to be a theological or philosophical or scientific argument that enables us to pin down objectively how all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to think and feel…to judge others here. Or for that matter, even ourselves.
I basically agree. But “for all practical purposes” that’s moot. If we choose to interact with others in a community our wants and needs will come into conflict. After all, name me a community where they never did or do? Especially in our postmodern world. And that is certainly no less the case in regard to abortion. But: However little or how much we know about a woman choosing an abortion that doesn’t make the conflicting goods here go away. Either the unborn’s right to life is championed or the pregnant woman’s right to choose is.
I merely note that how most of us as individuals come down here is rooted subjectively in dasein rather than in anything that theologians, philosophers or scientists can come upon with by way of settling this moral conflagration once and for all.
Okay, in regard to abortion, flesh this out for us. How are your own value judgments here not but moral and political prejudices rooted subjectively in dasein? How, in other words, are they not derived from your own rendition of obsrvr524’s “rock solid” “Coalition of Truth”. The “one of us” [the good guys] vs. “one of them” [the bad guys]. Here of course that revolving mainly around the conservatives vs. the liberals.
In other words, what if those points are applicable to them as well? What then of their precious self-righteous moral and political dogmas? What if they too find themselves admitting that, yeah, if their parents had died when they were babies and they went on to be raised in a very different family and lived very different lives, they might be in here arguing just the opposite of what they believe now?
That’s that part I note that can often configure them into Stooges here. The ILP equivalent of kill the messenger. No fractured and fragmented “I” for them!!!
Again, back to my assumption that in a No God world, all things are permitted. And they are permitted because one way or another, they can be ratrionalized. Until even those behaviors that most are utterly appalled by – raping children – can be rationalized by those who choose a morality that revolved solely around fulfilling the wants and needs of “me, myself and I”. The full-blown narcissists and sociopaths. Not to mention the psychopaths who have fucked up brains that can propel them in almost any direction at all.
I merely point out those who are outraged at anyone who would rape a child might be able to think themselves into believing it is okay to abort a potential human child. One rationalization here: it was only a clump of cells and not a real human being.
This could apply on many levels–on the level of whether abortion is right or wrong, but also on the level of whether judgment of a person’s stance on this issue is itself right or wrong. And my opening remarks would fall on the latter (I would think). So just as a right-wing conservative who is raised to believe in the right to life could have been raise by a left-wing liberal family to believe in the right to choose, so too could someone raised never to judge others have been raised to believe it is our duty to judge others, at least those who believe and act in wicked ways.
So then what is the question coming from you? Do you want me to address this argument? That we sometimes ought to judge others? Just as a show of where we stand? As an obligation to defend what’s right and attack what’s wrong? To seek out and identify evil and call it out such that it can be judged and dealt with appropriately?
Well, this is why I pointed out the higher level on which the moral stance I’m taking sits. It isn’t either/or–either the unborn’s right to life is championed or the mother’s right to choose is–there is at least one other option: don’t judge. If something is being championed, that counts as a judgment, but if we refrain from championing anything, that doesn’t count as a judgment (at least not about the woman’s choice or the value of the unborn’s life). But one can always be coerced into taking a side–to say openly which side they support (even if it’s not genuine)–is that where you’re going with this?
And I would agree–even though many theologians, philosophers, and maybe even scientists would no doubt object to this and insist that there is an objective way to settle the matter once and for all. IOW, it’s not that they can’t come up with something–it’s that for people like you and I, it would be a tough sell for them, and not nearly as convincing as they would hope.
There’s a lot of moving parts to this line of questioning and before I give an answer, I think we need to clear up a few things. Are you challenging me on my position about judging people (whether it is right or wrong) or on my position about abortion? Or both? Am I to defend why one should refrain from judging those who choose to abort their baby? And by that token, why one should refrain from judging those who choose to defend the baby’s right to live? Or are you asking me to pick a side on the abortion debate and (somehow) couch it in terms of the morality of judging people?
I could do either. Or both. But I wonder if we got our wires crossed with respect to what a “context” is. I’ve always thought that to you, a “context” meant a particular situation–like a particular woman on a particular night in some particular city who becomes pregnant by rape, and then we ask whether she has a right to abort the baby–and whatever the discussion happened to be about at that point (abortion in this case) was already defined. But maybe I’ve got that backwards. I thought I was supplying the topic of the discussion (judging others) and your job was to supply the context (describing a hypothetical (or real) situation in which a woman is choosing to abort her baby, or a pro-life advocate was fighting against her right to do so, and then asking whether we have a right to judge them). But now that I think about, both our contributions could be taken as “contexts” or “discussion topics”–and it seems like the morality of judging others and the morality of aborting unborn babies are alternative “context” (not necessarily mutually exclusive but difficult and confusing to mix together in the same discussion). So is a “context” to you a (controversial) topic for discussion, or is it a hypothetical (or real) particular situation in which the controversial topic for discussion will often be raised? Did you have in mind to mix them both in some way, or should we be picking one or the other? Were you confused by the OP asking you to pick a context while I plowed ahead with one already?
If we can clear this up first, I promise to get back to your challenge and give it my best shot.
Right, which is an interesting discussion point in itself–when does that clump of cells become human?–but I think we need to clear up some of the confusion I pointed out above before going any further (I’ll certainly get confused if you won’t). So can we do that first (please and thank you)?
To me it is obvious.
Abortion is a form of killing.
Just because one person wants an abortion,
for their “good reasons”, ae, not wanting the work that is required to raise a child.
Doesn’t mean it is a good, or a conflicting good.
It means somebody is so stupid that they don’t know how to use contraception,
or things like condoms.
Your argument seems to be that abortion is not truly good or evil,
or some crap like that.
Just because a large amount of people are morally confused,
doesn’t render morals and values as “only subjective”.
“Objectivists” would believe that truth and values can be one.
True values exist.
Unfortunately, stupidity also exists.
Using their “freedom of speech” to talk shit all day and all night.
These people don’t have any weight when it comes to good truth, or true good.
What is it like not being married to one? Existentially, our reactions here, in being rooted subjectively in dasein, will all basically just be political prejudices. The fulminating fanatic objectivists here [and at Know Thyself] either learn that or they don’t.
Feminism is no less a political prejudice rooted in particular historical, cultural and experiential contexts. What, did you think that, like Satyr, it was inherently unnatural because genes > memes?
Oh, yeah. Dasein works in both directions, that’s for sure. Well, unless of course you are a particularly fierce pinhead objectivist. Then it’s my way or the highway.
I know! Let’s find out if you are one of them!!!
Indeed, and then straight back to this:
When it comes to this or that particular abortion, however, there’s no getting around it: one judgment or another. If only “for all practical purposes”. Either laws are passed permitting abortions or laws are passed prohibiting them. And you either accept/support those laws or you fight to overturn them. Or, if abortion is outlawed, you take the “back alley” route.
Or, outside the law, there will be individual and family and community reactions that involve one or another intertwining of rewards and punishments. Approval or disapproval. Support or condemnation.
You can offer your own subjective, rooted in dasein opinion/judgment or, like me, you can be drawn and quartered…fractured and fragmented and unable to either support or not support the woman faced with whether or not to abort this particular human embryo/fetus. Instead you take one or another existential leap recognizing that it is predicated by and large on a mere political prejudice.
As for what one “ought” to do when confronted with a particular context, that will always be subsumed existentially in sets of circumstances. Do you have the option not to judge at all? Will others allow you not to weigh in? Or will others expect or even insist that you do weigh in?
Thus…
Yet here you are at ILP basically judging [or whatever you call it] all those who don’t think like you do regarding any number of political issues. Sure, if you lived alone on an otherwise uninhabited island, you can choose not to judge because no one is around to hear it anyway. But let other castaways wash up on shore. Then what? Then the things you do and the things they do may result in conflicts. Try not judging then. Here it then comes down to might makes right and the most powerful prevail, or right makes might and you all agree on what is the most rational and virtuous behavior, or moderation, negotiation and compromise. Which, in regard to abortion in America and most of the industrial West of late, has been the road most traveled.
Over and again I admit that there may well be an objective morality. Re nature or ideology or deontology. Just as over and again I admit that there may wll be a God. So, do others here believe that to be the case? Okay, given particular contexts let’s hear their argument…let’s see their accumulation of evidence to back it up.
What I am challenging are all those who insist that, in regard to either judgments themselves or particular value judgments relating to things like abortion, our individual frames of mind are not rooted more in dasein than in any assessment derived from theologians, philosophers or scientists. Judging people is something that those in human communities must do in a world of conflicting goods. Even if we can’t pin down definitively whether or not we ought to judge people. There is simply no way around it. Either in the form of customs or folkways or mores or laws.
Defend it in whichever way you think is best. But that doesn’t make my points above go away. If you have never, ever been in a situation that involved an abortion, sure, it’s all the easier to turn the discussion into a “philosophical” argument. But if you had been either Mary or John and were eyeball to eyeball with birth or death…what then?
I found myself more and more drawn and quartered. Both making very good arguments. And both very close friends of mine. Then Barrett’s Irrational Man and his “rival goods”. The part where existentially “theory and practice” reconfigured me [eventually[ into a fractured and fragmented “I” revolving around this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
Now I’ll I can do is to bump into others in places like this and ask them how, in regard to things like abortion, this is or is not applicable to their own “self”/Self.
Well, for me, it’s more “I” could do either. Again, going back to to my parents dying when I was just a baby and my being raised in a very differnt family and living a very different life. Or my not having been drafted into the Army, being sent to Vietnam/Song Be and meeting Mac and Danny and John and Steve. Any context given the trajectory of my actual life. To what extent are philosophers/ethicist/political scientists etc., able to take all of that “existential/dasein” stuff into account and arrive at the optimal or the only rational behaviors when dealing with abortion. Or all the other conflicting goods.
I don’t see how, “for all practical purposes” the two can be separated in regard to the “real world” conflagration that is abortion. Not until philosophy [deontologically] or science [using the scientific method] or theologians [with the actual One True God] are able to encompass the one definitive assessment of both.
And is that before we get to “the gap” and “Rummy’s Rule” going back, say, to the complete understanding of Existence itself?
“Clearing things up” given that context?
And for literally hundreds of millions around the globe that is still the default revelation.
It’s no where near entirely arbitrary. It starts with all of the basic needs we share in common given paritcular historic and cultural contexts that can drag out for years, decades, and even centuries. Re the assessments of those like Marx and Engels.
Or the all-knowing philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and Descartes and Kant. But even they rooted the a priori in the transcending God.
Only in our profoundly problematic and particularly precarious “post-modern” world, that sort of “Meaning and Purpose” meets, among other things, the internet and mass media; and then, well, let a “thousand hopelessly conflicting and contradictory One True Paths bloom”?
Agency “profoundly, problematically, and precariously” rooted in dasein let’s say. Though the psychopaths are let off the hook [by some] because it really is – chemically, neurologically – “beyond their control”. Like any mayhem we commit in our dreams.
If, in fact, we don’t actually live in a wholly determined universe where the slumbering brain and the awakened brain are actually interchangeable.
Confounded, however, is what “I” feels the closer it gets to dasein.
On the other hand, given an essentially meaningless and purposeless existence that tumbles over into the abyss that is oblivion, what possible difference could that make in the context of “all there is” anyway?
I’ve tried that with you, Dan. And the conclusion I came to [and noted to you] was that our understanding of the existential relationship between identity, value judgments and political power is so far apart, a “failure to communicate” is basically inevitable.
But, okay, let’s go here:
How would you demonstrate to us that abortion, as a moral issue, is what you truly believe it to be?
That, what, all rational and virtuous men and women would be obligated to think as you do about it?
And then the part I’ve been bringing up of late on other threads…
Suppose when you were a baby, your parents had died and you were raised in a very different family, living a very different life. Such that your experiences and relationships and access to information and knowledge resulted in you coming here embracing just the opposite point of view about the morality of abortion.
