Here we get into the distinctions that are made between something being right, moral, ethical, politically correct, virtuous, legitimate, appropriate etc…
The tragedy of abortion in my view is that from both sides of the issue these words can used interchangably. This is what disturbs equal2u, in my view.
Legality, on the other hand, is more readily demonstrated. And, ultimately, it comes down to who has the power to enforce a particular agenda.
That’s Faust’s objection, and now it’s my objection too.
This is where we are talking past each other. You are saying that the only way we could have a moral belief about abortion is a belief about whether abortion is “in fact” moral. Then you define “in fact” as “independent of dasein” or “having transcended dasein.” Of course there are no moral facts if we cannot transcend dasein and a moral fact is a result of transcending dasein. Obviously!
I agree. I also agree that the point of view we embrace includes a moral belief. Maybe when YOU SPECIFICALLY think about this moral dilemma, YOU decline to posit a moral fact (because of your philosophical training or whatever), but what should matter for an existentialist, and ESPECIALLY a Heideggerian is whether we do this in AVERAGE EVERYDAYNESS.
You’ve just said that points of view are rooted in dasein. We don’t have to transcend dasein in order to have a point of view. Thus, we don’t have to transcend dasein in order to posit a moral fact. People constantly posit moral facts in everyday life. Just because you think the existence of moral facts is ultimately indefensible on some heady philosophical level doesn’t change the existentiale of people positing moral facts.
You want to have your cake and eat it too. You want to avoid rationality by claiming to be concerned with the real world (“moral facts are not proven by rational arguments”), and you want to avoid the real world by claiming to be concerned with philosophy (“if a moral “in fact” exists we would have to transcend dasein in order to see it”).
Yes, this is true. I understand that. But over and again I note what my approach to philosophy is: to use it as a way [a tool] to make the distinction between knowledge that transcends dasein and mere opinions that reflect the subjective and subjunctive agenda of each uniquely existential man and woman.
And this is certainly applicable to discussions that revolve around morality. If, however, you wish to use philosophy for other purposes, fine. I have no objection to that. What I am looking for are those who do use it for other pursuits and can then integrate their own discoveries into a constructive critique of mine.
Yes, but there are those who insist you can. They invent Gods and ideologies. They obviate moral ambiguity and uncertainty by subsuming the moral agent in duty and obligation.
William Barrett from Irrational Man:
…in a good many cases there is no such universal rule or receipe available, and the individual can do nothing but muddle through on his own and decide for himself. Life seems to have intended it this way, for no moral blueprint has ever been drawn up that covers all the situations for us beforehand so that we can be absolutely certain under which rule the situation comes. Such is the concreteness of existence that a situation may come under several rules at once, forcing us to choose outside any rule and from inside oursleves.
Ah, but if you can convince yourself this is not the case, that a “moral blueprint” can be found [in God, in Reason] you take the weight that is “the agony of choice in the face of uncertainty” off your shoulder and live in certitude.
And if that is not basically a psychological defense mechanism what is it?
iambiguous wrote:
Can philosophy enable us to determine whether abortion is in fact moral?
I emphasize the expression “in fact” here because the facts regarding abortion are all on the side of the doctors who perform them. They are medical facts built into the evolution of life on earth…of human biology.
But there are folks who insist that we can “in fact” know whether abortion is moral or immoral with the same sort of certainty. But, in fact, we cannot. The facts embedded in performing an abortion as a medical procedure are applicable to all daseins. These facts transcend mere points of view. But the sense of certainty embraced by each side in defending or defaming abortion morally can only—ultimately—be opinions, not facts.
Not sure what exactly you are suggesting here. I suggest a moral belief is just a point of view. There may be any number of actual facts embedded in the arguments from both sides. But you can’t add the facts [embedded in premises] up such that one conclusion is said to in fact be true. Instead, you reach the point where the logic embedded in the facts from both arguments breaks down and the irresistable force that is one argument meets the immovable object that is the other. That’s the limitation of language [of philosophy] even in an exchange of moral arguments that contain facts. That’s Barrett’s point.
I don’t believe we can transcend dasein—however many actual facts are accumulated in our arguments.
For example, you could argue it is a fact that aborting a fetus that is well beyond the “point of viability” is qualitatively different from aborting an embryo that is just a clump of cells. Yes, that is, in fact, true. But it doesn’t change the point I made in the OP. My point revolved around another fact instead: That, in forcing women to give birth against their will, you are denying them the possibility of gender equality. Why? Because only women can become pregnant and forcing them to give birth would certainly impact their lives grieviously. How, for example, could they attend the best colleges or acquire the best jobs if they are forced to have babies against their will? Then we are, once again, back to Barrett.
No, I want to situate “rationality” out in the world of actual human interaction by exposing its limitations regarding human moral conflicts. I want to explore the relationship between philosophy and human behaviors that come into conflict. But not just in the world of words.
George Bernard Shaw on The Golden Rule in, Maxims for Revolutionists
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.
Do not love your neighbor as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury.
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
Sander Lee on Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors:
[b]…Allen’s investigation of the moral decline of society had been limited to acts which, while clearly immoral, were rarely illegal. In Crimes and Misdemeanors…the main character, Judah Rosenthal, comes to ‘see’ that in a world devoid of divine presence, all acts are permissible, even murder.
The apparent philosophical despair of this film, in which the most moral individual, Ben, is shown gradually going blind, has been taken by many to symbolize Allen’s ultimate sense of hopelessness. All of the supposedly virtuous characters are shown wearing glasses because of their inability to see the true nature of the world. As the film progresses, one character, Halley, is apparently able to discard her glasses only after she has also discarded her values by agreeing to marry an arrogant, pompous but successful TV producer Lester. Allen’s character, Cliff Stern, is punished for his commitment to his beliefs as we see him lose everything he cared for: his love, his work, and even his spiritual mentor, the philosophy professor Louis Levy who, like Primo Levi, survived the Holocaust but responds to the petty immoralities of everyday life by killing himself.
Most ominously, Judah, who bears the name of one of the greatest fighters for traditional Jewish values and heritage, betrays the faith of his father Sol by not only committing a murder, but also renouncing the consequenses of his guilt in a universe which he declares to be indifferent to our actions.[/b]
Now, in my view, Woody Allen blinked in this film re the manner in which he rationalized the murder. In two ways:
1] He clearly portrays the murdered mistress, Dolores, as a neurotic demon from hell bent on destroying his marriage by exposing their relationship to Judah’s wife. He tries to escape the noose by talking her out of it first…but she won’t go along with him.
2] He clearly shows the moral agony Judah endured as he genuinely wrestled with the searing ambivalence of hiring someone to kill the woman.
Suppose, instead, the mistress was nothing like that at all? Suppose she was an enormously appealing woman? Suppose he wanted her dead for a far less weighty reason? He just got tired of her and had her killed so there was never any possibility at all of this wife finding out. And, in turn, suppose he reacted to her death as he might react to a mere inconvenience in his life? Suppose her death didn’t bother him at all?
In other words, it is still the same Godless universe in both scenarios…one where all human behaviors are essentially interchangable in the end. That, of course, is something [a point of view] most folks find particularly unnerving, right?
More Lee:
Dialogue from the film Crimes and Misdemeaners:
[b]Judah:
'Our entire adult lives you and I have been having this same converstation in one form or another.
Ben:
‘Yes, I know. It’s a fundamental difference in how we view the world. You see it as harsh and empty of vaules and pitiless, and I couldn’t go on living if I didn’t feel it with all my heart a moral structure, with real meaning, and forgivenesss, and some kind of higher power, otherwise there’s no basis to know how live!’
When Ben says that they have moved from ‘a small infidelity to the meaning of existence’, he suggests an interpretation of both the film’s title and the interrelationship between its two plotlines. How one acts to deal with ‘a small infidelity’ determines one’s position on the very ‘meaning of existence’. The distance between such small misdemeanors and unforgivable crimes is much shorter than normally thought, once one has rejected all notions of values and responsibilty.[/b]
This is the way the world actually functions, in my view. Once God is gone, all is permitted. But that does not mean we are not compelled to come up with our own moral compass. We are and most do. It suggests only that whichever one we do come up with is merely an existential reflection of how we choose to live. There is no Right or Wrong way.
And it is, in my opinion, the visercal psychological repugnance that many feel trying to imagine a world like that [the world as it really is] that motivates psychological defense mechanisms to kick in in order to rescue us from an essentially absurd and meaningless world. God thus becomes the mother of all psychological defense mechanisms. We embrace God because, among other things, God stands for the possibility [or the certainty] of Divine Justice.
And, for some who cannot believe in God, they replace Him with Reason. But there is no more or less ratioanl or logical manner in which to differentiate moral from immoral behavior in a Godless universe. How could there be when the vantage point of a mere mortal is inherently existential?
Morality and ethics are beliefs. Nothing more.
You can choose to either believe in them or not to.
There is no such thing as universal values.
The universe cares not of morality or ethics where it imposes nothing.
A lot of morality and ethics end up in contradictions which shows their absurd imperfect existence.
One could say that morality and ethics are so entirely relative or subjective that they don’t really matter at all.
I shall play the skeptic in this discussion.
From Shows About Nothing by Thomas Hibbs:
According to…Immanuel Kant, a democracy is a community of individuals who are simultaneously sovereigns and subjects. No longer is revealed religion, nature or nature’s God an appropriate basis for our own self-understanding. Since these are all in some measure extrinsic to the human will, reliance on them is seen to be alienating, an infringment of the dignity of the individual. In Kant’s technical language, submission to them puts the individual in a state of ‘heteronomy’, the exact opposite of autonomy. Kant is remarkably optimistic about the agreement that is likely to result from everyone cultivating his autonmy, for he supposess that since each is under his own command, each will acknowledge and respect the dignity of the others in their capacity for self legislation.
Hibbs then goes on to ponder these arguments in an analysis of the film To Kill a Mockingbird:.
…Mockingbird seems to be of two minds about tradition and cultural particularity. On the one hand, in Kantian fashion, it asks us to prescind from the prejudices of blind tradition and look past the superficial veils of race. On the other hand, the conception of duty that Atticus embodies is infused with the code of honor appropriate to the Southern gentleman. From the Kantian perspective, then, To Kill a Mockingbird would be a somewhat impure depiction of the politics of autonomy. That assessment may tell us more about the deficiencies of the model of autonomy than about the dramatic flaws of the film. The problem is that radical autonomy, since it undercuts faith in any objective or communally shared source of morality, easily gives way to nihilism. Once cultural nihilism becaomes prevalent, no one has the right or the capacity to determine where the laws ought to be drawn.
Hibbs whole conjecture here revolves around the inherent tension between “too much” autonomy [anarchy] and “too little” [autocracy]. And this applies not just in the narrow political sense but in all other aspects of human interaction as well. He draws our attention to the role of “liberal democracy” and how, perhaps, in taking so much of what we once traditionally construed as essentially right and wrong behavior [think of sexual mores in the 50’s and sexual mores today, for example] off the leash, we have created a debilitating and herterogenous rootlessnees that, perhaps, might necessitate reintroducing a more…well…heteronomous frame of mind all over again. But of course “common sense” would prevail in the end.
Ah, but which rendition of it? And common sense all too often devolves over time into the “lowest common denominator” sensibilities of “the masses”.
Kant, of course, was able to subsume all this in a rational philosophical assessment of human ethical interaction. The mind would deduce the requisite a priori assumptions respecting the manner in which “practical reason” [in conjunction with a Good Will] would then become the horse pulling and regulating the cart. Then, perforce, this philosophically motivated moral agent would derive just the right mix of autonomy so as to convey to the world those behaviors deemed to be either universally right or universally wrong.
In theory, as it were. But, ironically…i.e. for all practical purposes…this has rarely been sustained beyond particular individuals who claim to live their lives in the moral tradition of Kant. Which, however, is seen as being superior to those who live their lives in the moral tradition of, say, Plato. Why? Because Kant’s rendition of it is “squared” with the phenomenal world somehow. God is, well, a lot deeper in the background.
Authority therefore would be rooted categorically and imperatively in one’s moral duty. As though throughout the entire history of human social, political and economic relationships this has ever actually happened self-consciously [over large segments of a population acting out a philosophical agenda]. As though Kant’s rendition of human moral interaction isn’t just the equivalent of a footnote in the works of Marx and Engels.
But then Nietzsche’s biggest blunder may well have revolved around his failure to read Marx in turn. Philosophy, after all, is to political economy what lungs are to air. You can’t really make sense out of one until you understand its relationship to the other. And what good are lungs without air?
Reading about the “Spring offensive” being planned by some in the OWS movement prompts this:
That, because people do not share our values does not mean we have to appeal to “something unreasonable” in them. Instead, we have to acknowlege this: the facts we use in order to discover, embrace, describe, evaluate and judge values [our own or others] are open to conflicting – yet reasonable – interpretations.
Take, for example, one of the most fundamental conflicts of all: are human beings basically social animals prone towards cooperation and compromise [an argument for socialism] or should we view men and women from the perspective of the individual prone towards competition and conflict [an argument for capitalism]?
Well, historical, anthropological, experiential and anecdotal evidence abounds—for both points of view.
In fact, out in the world we live in, a reasonable argument can be made for both capitalism and socialism. In other words, there are veritably hundreds and hundreds of complex and countervailing variables out of which almost any interpretation can be said to make sense.
In my view, what the ideological factions on both sides of this conflagration fail to grasp is the manner in which most of the wealth and power in the world is garnered by those who are largely amoral in their approach to policy. They merely want to sustain a world in which they predominate “for all practical purposes”.
Emile Cioran:
Even today nobody can tell what is right or what is wrong. It will be same in the future. The relativity of such expressions means little; not to be able to dispense with their use is more significant. I don’t know what is right and what is wrong, and yet I divide actions into good and bad. If anyone asked me why I do so, I couldn’t give an answer. I use moral criteria instinctively; later, when I reconsider, I do not find any justification for having done so. Morality has become so complex and contradictory because its values no longer constitute themselves in the order of life but have crystalized in a transcendental region only feebly connected to life’s vital and irrational forces.
Are our contemporary myths about right and wrong [in the industrial West] really all that more sophisticated than those practiced by primitive, aboriginal tribes around the globe? They certainly cannot be defended as more effective. In fact “the order of life” in the modern world becomes increasingly more fragmented with each passing year. So much so that evangelicals [of all religious and
secular stripes] are on the warpath in nation after nation to recreate that old order. Or a new order even more doctrinaire and draconian.
Is human morality something we can take seriously from a philosophical perspective? We don’t pursue good and bad because we have ensnared them in logic; we do so because it is a fundamental part of being human. We interact—socially and politically and economically. That means disagreements and conflicts. And there are only so many slices in the pie; so rules have to be devised to facilitate the least dysfunctional method for dividing it up.
And we know how that is generally done.
Of course we interact in other ways as well—sexually, emotionally, within and between communities, artistically, racially, ethnically, between genders. But in the 21st century the rules are barely connected at all anymore to “life’s vital and irrational forces”. Instead, amidst a fractured demographic smorsgasbord of literally hundreds of communities and sub-cultures, we kind of make things up as we go along. The old “orders of life” have now transfigured into “lifestyles”.
Everyone has their own story. And even when you recognize this is all it is you also recongnize it is not practical to abandon it. You have to come up with one or another rationale [or rationalization] to justify what you do. And even this analysis is just one more story about how human moral interaction unfolds.
The part that confuses some people, however, is Cioran’s conjecture that human moral interaction reflects an intuitve or instinctive discourse. They prefer to believe we have left that to the savages. We have become so much more civilized in the way in which we ponder and then institutionalize these things; and so derive a much more considered set of moral convictions. And we can, of course, defend them with rational arguments the more primitive folks know nothing of.
Next to us, in fact, they know practically nothing at all.
About, say, lifestyles or the rule of law or the global economy or nihilism.
Just watched a documentary on the South Asian tsunami. One of the reasons this tragedy hits home for lots of people is the realization it could very easily be them next time. There is almost no place you can reside on the planet that is not potentially in the path of one natural calamity or anaother—earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tonadoes, the big one from space.
But let’s be honest: the reason the death toll was as high as it was there [or after the earthquake in Haiti] is because it effected areas where there were lots and lots of people living in poverty. That’s the way of the world.
Still, there is no real moral outrage being expressed regarding the devastation because it was the result of a natural disaster. An “act of god” if you will.
Irony intended.
Say what you will about the tsunami’s destructve power, but you can’t say it acted immorally, right? You can’t call it an “evil” thing. It is just an adventitious movement in the earth’s crust that precipitated horrific consequences for those unlucky enough to be in its path.
On the other hand, imagine a context in which the source of human misery is perceived to be exploitation or injustice. For example, according to WHO, every 24 hours nearly 20,000 children aged 5 years and younger die of starvation around the globe. That means in one week almost as many of these innocent kids will perish of hunger [one of the most agonizing and protracted ways to die] as have all the victums of the South Asian tsunami. It is the equivalent of nearly 50 of these tsunamis every single year. And all the victums are babies and infants and very young children.
Yet where is the moral outrage?
Some say the reality of worldwide starvation is built right into a worldwide global economy in which a small percentage of the world’s wealthiest citizens gobble up a huge percentage of the world’s resources day after day. Three and one half billion men, women and children literally subsist on less than $2 a day. And it has been estimated that if we used the food thrown away in dumpsters by American restaurants every night we could feed every single starving person around the globe ten times over. But we don’t.
And the moral codes embraced by many very compassionaite and decent and caring people seem to be completely oblivous to this. Why? Why is 7,000,000 children starving to death every year not leading the newscasts night after night?
And when folks walk into Wal Mart to buy their cheap products they don’t ask who made them…or what the working conditions were like…or whether the stuff came from sweatshops in which millions of adults and children are paid pennies a day. Why? Could it possibly have something to do with relationship between how morality is perceived in these countries and how that is intimately interwined in the relationships between government and corporations and the media?
But then those who run the world have plenty of their own rationalizations to justify why their way is the best of all possible worlds. And who knows, maybe it is.
To me that is the horror built right into human moral and political interaction. There is no way to say for certain which social or political or economic system is the most ethical. Says who? Based on what criteria?
And with no God to appeal to you have to endure the way the world works as best you can. Or organize with others and try to change it. Of course if you are one of those reaping the benefits of the way it works now you will probably not see all this in the manner in which those who are not benefiting do.
It makes you wonder. Could ethical convictions perhaps be, well, situational?
iambiguous–we need a viral list of ten things every citizen can do to fix this. Things that do not help the poor depend on others. Things that make the rich want to help. Links to where this is already going down with charted and peer-reviewed results.
From today’s Slate
slate.com/articles/health_an … ates_.html
But it changes nothing really. Re abortion, morality and ethics still revolve around conflicting goods. You can call the unborn “human” [conscious or not] anytime between conception and birth and it does not change the fact that aborting it is good and bad only from a particular point of view [rooted in dasein]. There has yet to be an argument that resolves this. Not one that I have heard.
This can then be taken beyond abortion to the question of animal rights as well:
My take on all this data is that it is extremely likely that all the species that can recognize themselves in the mirror or show metacognitive abilities have an advanced form of consciousness. But for any species that hasn’t yet passed these tests, we simply don’t know whether they lack the ability or just haven’t been tested appropriately. The cautious attitude, I believe, is to assume that all mammals and the octopus at the very least, but possibly many more species, have a significant capacity for consciousness.
So, the author chooses to be a vegetarian. But that too can only be a point of view. There is no way to demonstrate that all rational and ethical humans beings should be vegetarians.
Pain, stupidity and death are common, but that doesn’t give them merit. Existence isn’t a form of merit.
Allot of that isn’t necissary either. It’s like when we discovered penecilin. It made some forms of disease non leathal, or made a certain amount of death and pain unnecissary.
Pain, stupidity and death either exist or they do not. You are in pain because you did something stupid and this stupidity may in fact lead to your death.
True or false. End of story.
But morality does not revolve around this sort of thing. Instead, it revolves around behaviors in which there are conflicting narratives regarding whether the behavior was the right or the wrong thing to do. Did John merit being executed by the state because he took the life of Jim? Did John believe taking Jim’s life was merited? Was either death merited?
Staten then takes this existential quantary into the realm of political narratives that many of us are familiar with in this day and age.
But just because the world is this way [or, rather, is argued to be this way] does not relieve us of the burdon of choosing. We can only muddle through it to the best of our ability. My argument is that the “best of all possible worlds” here is democracy and the rule of law. One that revolves around moderation, negociation and compromise. One that revolves around a more sophisticated understanding of dasein.
That I am cynical regarding even this does not mean others will be though. I come into places like this trying to imagine a way to think about a world sans God a little less cynically.
[b]From “Meaning & Morality in Modernity”
By Andrew Brower Latz
In modern society we live with an ethical predicament: as our form of society has increased our material well-being, it has simultaneously leached the significance from our experience. Our intellectual life is dominated by scientific rationality, and our practical life by bureaucratic rationality (these two forms of reason are similar); and although they are very good at securing the means of life, they drain from the world the “sources of meaning and significance that traditionally anchored ethical practices”: God, community, nature. So the end result of these forms of rationality and their institutional expressions in our politics and societies, has been the undermining of both morality and meaning.[/b]
Consequently, folks like you and I will still wander in and out of forums like this in order to [perhaps] pin down the meaning of morality and/or the morality of meaning once again.
Or even to discover/invent an entirely new rendition.
But has there really been a new one of late? A narrative, in other words, that the discoverer/inventor is able to take out of her head, and, using the tools of philosophy, describe a coherent moral agenda that all rational folks are able to embrace?
Or, instead, is the “ethical predicament” all the more deeply entrenched given the assumption that God is dead?
One thing that seems rather apparent to me is that there tends to be two very differnt reactions to the “dilemma”. On the one hand, there are those who never really give it much thought at all. On the contrary, they are too busy submerging themselves in the distractions of pop culture and consumption. It is ever and always about fitting into the latest fad or fancy or fashion.
And then there are those able to make a leap [intellectually] to one or another objectivist la la land where meaning and morality are constructed by and large out of words.
And that really doesn’t leave many folks around who are willing and able to acknowledge just how far removed they have now become from what once did pass for those “traditional” comforts and consolations.
From “Morality: The Final Delusion?” by Richard Garner in Philosophy Now magazine
Am I then myself a “moral error” proponent?
On the other hand, I am always quick to suggest that any and all such “theoretical” reflections on this be brought down to earth.
Also, I would never argue that objective morality does not exist. Anymore then I would argue that God does not exist.
My point instead regarding these realtionships is that any particular frame of mind here would seem to be a complex intertwining of that which we can in fact demonstrate is true objectively for all of us [math, the laws of nature, the logical rules of language] and that which seems more in sync with what I have come to construe as an “existential contraption” rooted in “I” as dasein.
At best in my view we can only discuss these things given what we think we know is true here and now. While recognizing that what we think we know next week or next month or next year is really beyond calculating with any degree of certainty.
In other words, cue contingency, chance and change.
At the same time, morality can only be speculated about given the profoundly problematic implications of this contraption:
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.
Finally, in a wholly determined universe, human morality itself would seem to be just one more domino toppling over; going all the way back to whatever brought into existence the existence of existence itself.
I just wanted to ask those who believe abortion to be immorally bad.
How many children have you adopted?
I think this line of argument would mean I have to become a pothead if applied elsewhere.
No. Just here on this forum of topic.
I meant in the context of legalization of marijuana debates. We can certainly try to find out if anti-abortionists do this or that, but it still leaves open the issues around abortion. Some of them likely have adopted children. So, we still have to do the real, tough work of figuring out the issue itself, rather than hoping that ad hom based arguments will save us the bother.